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MEMOIR 

OF 

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

BY T. MEDWIN, ESQ. 



AND 

I 
ORIGINAL POEMS AND PAPERS 

BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 



/ 




LONDON : 

WHITTAKER, TREACHER, & CO. 
1833. 



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LONDON : 

J. HOLMES, TOOK-'S COURT, CHANCERY LANE. 



/ 



ADVERTISEMENT. 



The Memoir and the majority of the 
Papers here collected, originally appeared 
in the Athenaeum of last year ; but many 
persons having expressed a wish to have 
them in a separate form, they are now re- 
published, with additions, and by consent of 
the Proprietors. 



LINES 

Written by the Author of * The Bride's Tragedy? in the 
blank-leaf of the 'Prometheus Unbound.' 

Write it in gold — a Spirit of the sun, 

An Intellect ablaze with heavenly thoughts, 

A Soul with all the dews of pathos shining, 

Odorous with love, and sweet to silent woe 

With the dark glories of concentrate song, 

Was sphered in mortal earth. Angelic sounds, 

Alive with panting thoughts, sunned the dim world ; 

The bright creations of a human heart 

Wrought magic in the bosoms of mankind : 

A flooding summer burst on Poetry, 

Of which the crowning sun, the night of beauty, 

The dancing showers, the birds, whose anthems wild. 

Note after note, unbind the enchanted leaves 

Of breaking buds, eve, and the flow of dawn, 

Were centred and condensed in his one name 

As in a providence — and that was SHELLEY. 

Oxford, 1822. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Memoir of Shelley 1—106 

Invocation to Misery 108 

To a Lady singing to her Accompaniment on the 

Guitar 114 

Lines— written during the Castlereagh Administration .. 115 

With a Guitar 117 

The Magnetic Lady to her Patient 120 

To the Queen of my Heart 123 

Similes 125 

The Coliseum : a Fragment 127 ^ 

The Age of Pericles 135 

Sculpture in the Florence Gallery: 

The Niobe 138 

The Minerva 142 

The Venus called Anadyomine 145 

A Bas-relief 147 

Michael Angelo's Bacchus 149 

A Juno 150 

An Apollo 151 



Vlll CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Arch op Titus 151 

Reflections : 

Life 153 

Death 155 

Love 156 

Remarks on c Mandeyille' and Mr. Godwin 157 

On < Frankenstein' 165 

On the Revival of Literature 170 

A System of Government by Juries : a Fragment . . 174 



MEMOIR 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 



Lord Byron is said to have prevented the school- 
room at Harrow from being burnt in a rebellion, 
by showing the boys the names of their ancestors 
on the walls*; Shelley, to have entered into a 
conspiracy at Eton against the odious custom of 
fagging. I believe that neither of these anecdotes 
rests on any good authority. Shelley was in love 




* Byron's own name would now act as a spell against any 
similar attempt. I saw his name carved at Harrow, in three 
places, in very large characters— a presentiment of his future 
fame, or a pledge of his ambition to acquire it. 



* MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

with no Mary Duff* at eight years old, nor wrote 
epigrams on lame ducks, like Dr. Johnson, at four. 
I knew him from a child, our mothers being near 
relatives, but remember no precocity of genius 
which he displayed. His parents were not re- 
markable for any particular talent. It is true that 
his grandfather possessed what is thought most 
worth acquiring, the science of getting money, for, 
commencing the world with no fortune, he con-, 
trived to marry two of the richest heiresses in 
England, and to leave 20,0007. a year, and 300,000/. 

I * This love affair of Byron's seems rather to border on the 
1 ridiculous. That he showed a remarkable precocity of talent 
I is certain. A schoolfellow of his at Aberdeen, and who used to 
I visit his mother when lodging at Leslie's the apothecary's in 
! Broad Street, told me that Byron and himself were caught in a 
thunder storm, and obliged to take refuge in a cellar, where, 
to wile away the time, Byron, with much emphasis and action, 
recited a tale from the * Arabian Nights/ He might then be five 
years old. He was exceedingly pugnacious at this school, a 
character he maintained at Harrow, and notwithstanding the 
deformity in both his feet, he was very active. He used to 
blame his mother's mock delicacy for this defect, in common 
with many Scotch ladies of that time, it seems she had a pre- 
judice against accouchettrs. 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. * 

in the funds. A Greek poet says, that those who 
amass inordinate wealth " produce a stock that 
differs from the tree." Thus Shelley, even from 
a hoy, had a sovereign contempt for the universal 
idol. — But I am not "beginning with the begin- 
ning." He was born in August 1792, and brought 
up till seven or eight years of age in the retirement 
of Field Place, Sussex, with his sisters, receiving 
the same education as they — hence, he never showed 
the least taste for the sports or amusements of boys, 
and, on account of his girlishness, was, on going 
to school, subject to many persecutions which, in 
his introductory stanzas to ' The Revolt of Islam,' 
he depicts — 

Until there rose 
From the near school-room, voices that, alas ! 
Were but an echo from a world of woes, 

The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. 

* 

That school-room was not of Eton, but of Sion 
House, Brentford, where he passed several years 
preparatory to being sent to Eton. This place was 



4 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

a perfect hell to Shelley ; his pure and virgin mind 
was shocked by the language and manners of his 
new companions ; but, though forced to be with 
them, he was not of them. Methinks I see him 
now, pacing, with rapid strides, a favourite and 
remote spot of the playground — generally alone — 
and where, he says, I formed these resolutions : 

To be wise, 
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies 
Such power, for I grow weary to behold 
The selfish and the strong still tyrannize 
Without reproach or check. 

Tyranny generally produces tyranny in common 
minds — not so in Shelley. Doubtless, much of his 
hatred of oppression may be attributed to what he 
saw and suffered at this school ; and so odious was 
the recollection of the place to both of us, that we 
never made it the subject of conversation in after- 
life. He was, as a schoolboy, exceedingly shy, 
bashful, and reserved — indeed, though peculiarly- 
gentle, and elegant and refined in his manners, he 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 5 

never entirely got rid of his diffidence — and who 
would have wished he should ? With the charac- 
teristic of true genius, he was ever modest, humble, 
and prepared to acknowledge merit, wherever he 
found it, without any desire to shine himself, by 
making a foil of others. 

He went to Eton at thirteen. It was a new and 
better world: but Shelley's was a spirit that ill 
brooked restraint, or, in his own words, he cared 
to "learn little that his tyrants knew or taught;" 
nor did he distinguish himself much at Eton, 
where, as at other public schools, superior merit is 
only assigned to those who have the knack of 
making Latin verses — a task he abhorred. Perhaps 
his depreciation of the Latin poets (though common 
to all great Greek scholars) might be partly owing 
to his disgust at the recollection of being forced to 
swallow this, to him, bitter drug. I was surprised 
to find at every vacation the rapid developement of 
mind which each succeeding half-year produced in 



o MEMOIR OF SHELLEY, 

Shelley ; he proved himself also no bad scholar, 
before leaving Eton, by having translated several 
books of Pliny's Natural History: he told me he 
had stopped short at the chapters on Astronomy, 
which his tutor, on being consulted, owned his 
inability to explain.* Much of the last year, before 
he went to the University, was devoted to German, 
which he studied with his usual ardour of pursuit : 
and to his particular course of reading in this 
language I attribute much of his love of the 
romantic and the mystic and the marvellous. 

He had become a believer in the ghost stories 
and enchantments of the Black Forest, and was 
giving birth to no poetical fiction when he con- 
fessed — 

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped 
Thro' many a lonely chamber, cave, and ruin, 

* I remember his pointing out to me a passage that particu- 
larly struck him, and with which Calderon puzzles Cyprian, in 
the ' Magico Prodigioso' — " God must be all sense, all sight, 
all hearing, all life, all mind, self-existent," &c. Thence arose 
the first germ of Shelley's scepticism. 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. / 

And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing 
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead. 

Burgher's tale of ' Leonora' was an especial 
favourite with him : he had also procured the 
splendid edition illustrated by Lady Diana Beau- 
clerk ; and this wild ballad it was which inspired 
him to write verses. I remember well the first of 
his effusions, a very German-like fragment, begin- 
ning with — 

Hark ! the owlet flaps his wings 

In the pathless dell beneath, 
Hark ! 'tis the night-raven sings 

Tidings of approaching death. 

I think he was then about fifteen. Shortly after- 
wards we wrote, in conjunction, six or seven cantos 
on the story of the Wandering Jew, of which the 
first four, with the exception of a very few lines, 
were exclusively mine. It was a thing, such as 
boys usually write, a cento from different favourite 
authors ; the crucifixion scene altogether a plagiary 
from a volume of Cambridge prize poems. The 



8 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

part which I contributed I have still, and was 
surprised to find totidem verbis in Fraser's Maga- 
zine. The Wandering Jew continued to be a fa- 
vourite subject of Shelley's. In the notes of ' Queen 
Mab'* he gives the Legend, probably a translation 
from the German, from which Byron took that 
splendid idea in Manfred — 

Back, + 
Back by a single hair, I could not die. 

Shelley also introduces Ahasuerus in his c Hellas.' 

Voltaire did the same in the ' Henriade.' 

As might be shown by the last cantos of that 

poem, which Fraser did not think worth publishing, 

* Qaeen Mab was commenced when Shelley was seventeen, 

as is proved by its being dedicated to his first love, of whom 

he says — 

Thou wast my purer mind — 

Thou wast the inspiration of my song— 

Thine are these early wilding flowers, 

Though garlanded by me. 

This poem underwent, however, considerable correction ; and 

the notes were written after an interval of some years. 

t The pitiless curse held me by the hair, and I could not die. 

—Notes of Queen Mab, 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 9 

his ideas were, at that time, strange and incom- 
prehensible, mere elements of thought — images 
wild, vast, and Titanic. 

Shelley, like Byron, knew early what it was to 
love : almost all the great poets have. After 
twenty-five years, I still remember Harriet G., and 
when I call to mind all the women I have ever 
seen and admired, I know of none that surpassed, 
few that could compare with her in beauty. I think 
of her as of some picture of Raphael's, or as one 
of Shakspeare's women. Shelley and Miss G. were 
born in the same year. There was a resemblance, 
as is often the case in cousins, between them, such 
as Byron describes as existing between Manfred 
and Astarte, or, as Shelley himself, in a fragment, 
says — 

They were two cousins almost like to twins, 

****** 
And so they grew together like two flowers 
Upon one stem, which the same beams and showers 
Lull or awaken in their purple prime. 



10 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

If two persons were ever designed for each other, 
these seemed to be so. His novel of ' Zastrozzi,' 
a very wonderful work for a boy of sixteen, em- 
bodies much of the intensity of this passion that 
devoured him ; and some of the chapters were, he 
told me, written by the lady herself. Shelley's 
mishap at Oxford was a blight to all his hopes, 
the rock on which all his happiness split; — he had 
the heart-rending misery of seeing her he adored 
wedded to another. Save for that expulsion (which 
I had almost called an unfortunate one, but that, as 
far as the world is concerned, the epithet would 
have been misapplied), Shelley would probably 
have become a member for some close borough, a 
good acting magistrate, and an excellent country 
'squire. It is my firm belief, that he never wholly 
shook off this early attachment, that it was long 
the canker of his life, even if he ever really loved a 
second time. 

I remember, as if it occurred yesterday, his 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 11 

knocking at my door in the Temple at four o'clock 
in the morning after his expulsion. I think I hear 
his cracked voice, with its well-known pipe, " Med- 
win, let me in; I am expelled, (here followed a 
loud half-hysteric laugh) — I am expelled for Athe- 
ism." Though somewhat shocked, I was not much 
surprised at the news, having heen led, from the 
tenour of his letters, to anticipate some such end 
to his collegiate career. In my memoir on Shelley, 
in the ' Conversations of Lord Byron,' I have 
already spoken of the marvellous treatise and con- 
duct which led to this catastrophe. During the last 
term he had published also a strange half-mad 
volume of poems, entitled the ? Posthumous Works 
of my Aunt Margaret Nicholson/ in which were 
some panegyrical stanzas to the memory of Char- 
lotte Corday ; the poetry was well worthy of the 
subject — probably the copy I have is the only one 
existing. 

Shelley, whilst at University College, formed but 



12 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

one friendship,* and even that one was the effect 
of accident. Nor did this arise from any unsocial 
feeling, but from an unwillingness and dislike to 
form acquaintance with strangers, which charac- 
terized him all his life. That stiffness and for- 
mality, and unapproachableness, which are so justly 
ridiculed by foreigners in Englishmen, are not con- 
fined to the great world, but begin at the Uni- 
versity — perhaps there were no Etonians whom 
Shelley knew in the College — perhaps he shrunk 
from the idea of asking for introductions, and, en- 
tirely occupied in his pursuits and lucubrations, 
and always communing with himself, he knew not 
what solitude meant. 

As to chemistry, he was very superficial in that 

* I can perceive no resemblance to Shelley in the misanthrope 
Mandeville, though it is generally understood that Godwin in- 
tended that character as an idealism of Shelley, not of Shelley 
in the darker traits which led to crime, but to show how the 
most brilliant talents warped into a wrong direction, counteract 
all the external advantages of life, and conduce to their pos- 
sessor's misery. 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 13 

science. Its phenomena alone excited his interest. 
I believe he imbibed his taste for it from a private 
exhibition of Walker's Lectures, with which he was 
much struck : but all he knew consisted in setting 
fire to trees, burning holes in carpets, and flying 
kites to attract lightning — an idea borrowed from 
Franklin. He was not very profound either in his 
metaphysics at this time : Hume's Essays (of which 
he gave me a copy I have still) were his gospel. 
He was very serious at my ridiculing the chapter 
entitled * A Sceptical Solution of Sceptical Doubts,' 
and asking him what he could make of a doubtful 
solution of doubtful doubts. 

It was with some reluctance that the head of 
his college urged against him the fiat of banish- 
ment — not only on account of his extreme youth 
(he was only seventeen), but that his ancestors * 

* His grandfather married a descendant of Sir Philip Sydney. 
If Shelley had any aristocratic feelings, he was proud of this 
connexion. He told me that his uncle, the possessor of Pens- 
hurst, when here-settled his estates, offered him some thousand 



14 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

had been benefactors to the College, and founders 
of one exhibition, if not more. Is it not to be re- 
gretted that his tutor or some of the authorities of 
the University, did not attempt to convince him of 
the fallacy of his deductions, instead of resorting 
at once to expulsion, a poor test of truth? The 
Germans act differently with their sceptical under- 
graduates, and if argument fails, leave the correc- 
tion of their errors to time and good sense. Shelley 
looked upon the refusal of the examining masters 
to accept his challenge in the schools, as a proof 
that his logic was incontrovertible, and gloried in 
what he considered a persecution. But if Shelley 
thought thus, it was different with his father, who, 
proud of his son's talents, had looked forward to a 
brilliant career for his heir. Shelley, till his father's 
fury had in some degree evaporated, remained in 
town, and we lived much together. His mind was 

pounds to make over his contingency (for he was in the entail) ; 
but, that although he was in great want of money at the time, 
he declined the proposal. 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 15 

at that time wholly devoted to metaphysics, and he 
lived in a world of shadows, that fitted him well 
for the Clouds of Aristophanes. To instance this. 
Being in Leicester Square one morning at five 
o'clock (I hardly know what I was doing there 
myself at that early hour), I was attracted hy a 
group of boys standing round a well-dressed person 
lying near the rails. On coming up to them I 
discovered Shelley, who had unconsciously spent a 
part of the night sub dio. 

I am not sure whether it was at this period that 
he was in the habit of noting down his dreams. 
The first day, he said, they made a page, the next 
two, the third several, till at last they constituted 
far the greater part of his existence, realizing what 
Calderon says, in his comedy of La Vida es Sueno — 
" Sueno es Sueiio." 
Dreams are but the dreams of other dreams. 

His correspondents had now become very nu- 
merous, for he was in the habit of writing to all 



16 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

those whose works pleased or interested him. 
Among the rest he addressed some letters to a 
beautiful girl, who had just published a volume, 
in which he discovered the germs of that talent 
which marks her as the first poetess of the day. 
Why should I not name Mrs. Hemans ? 
On his return to 

His cold fire-side and alienated home, 
we kept up an almost daily correspondence. Much 
of the subject-matter of it was controversial, and, 
as is common with disputants, literary as well as 
others, his reasonings made no impression on me — 
mine had no power to convert him. Yet, sceptic 
as he was, he became such from no selfish feelings. 
On the contrary, attributing the vices and miseries 
of society to the existing system of things, the 
"anarch custom," he determined to employ all his 
thoughts, talents, and energies, to combat it, with 
a view of ameliorating the condition of man. I 
shall speak of his doctrines at some length hereafter. 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 1? 

He had, very early, this ambition of becoming a 
reformer, and wrote to Rowland Hill under a feigned 
name, proposing to preach to his congregation — of 
course he received no answer. 

Of the marriage into which he was inveigled at 
eighteen, I shall say little. What could be expected 
from an union where there was no concord, no 
sympathy of taste or pursuits, and when every 
coming day must have revived in dismal contrast 
the being his soul idolized ? 

I shall not follow him during his visit to Mr. 
Southey * at the Lakes, his residence in Sackville 
Street, Dublin, or in North Wales. From Ireland 
he sent me a political pamphlet. It was very long, 

* He was once a great admirer of Southey's poems, particu- 
larly ' Thalaba/ and ' The Curse of Kehamah.' He told me in 
Italy, he looked upon him as a great improvisatore, and that it 
was sufficient to have read his poems once. The fact was, that 
Shelley always coupled the man with his works, and it must be 
remembered that Southey once addressed sonnets to the au- 
thoress of the Rights of Women, and eulogized Charlotte Corday 
and Wat Tyler. 



18 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

closely printed, very ill digested, but abounding in 
splendid passages. I am only aware of his having 
written one other pamphlet, under the name of 
i The Hermit of Mario w.' This was on the occasion 
of the Princess Charlotte's death. The title was 
only a masque for politics. Under the lament of 
the Princess he typified Liberty, and rung her knell. 
In Ireland, however, he made himself obnoxious to 
the government, and in consequence left the coun- 
try. Shelley was of opinion, that for many years a 
price was set upon his head, and that several at- 
tempts were made to cut him off. I had a long 
conversation with Mr. Maddocks, whose tenant he 
was, in Carnarvonshire, as to what occurred, or 
Shelley supposed to occur, there. The scene at 
the inn in ' Count Fathom,' was hardly surpassed 
in horror by the recital Shelley used to make of the 
circumstance. The story was this : At midnight, 
sitting in his study, he heard a noise at the window, 
saw one of the shutters gradually unclosed, and a 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 1$ 

hand advanced into the room, armed with a pistol. 
The muzzle was directed towards him, the aim 
taken, and the trigger drawn. The weapon flashed 
in the pan. Shelley, with that personal courage 
which particularly distinguished him, rushed out to 
discover and endeavour to seize the assassin. In 
his way towards the outer door, at the end of a 
long passage leading to the garden, he meets the 
ruffian, whose pistol misses fire a second time. A 
struggle now ensues. — This opponent he described 
as a short powerful man. Shelley, though slightly 
built, was tall, and at that time strong and mus- 
cular. They were no unequal match. It was a 
contest between mind and matter. — After long and 
painful exertion the victory was fast declaring itself 
for Shelley, which his antagonist finding, extricated 
himself from his grasp, rushed into the grounds, 
and disappeared among the shrubbery. Shelley 
made a deposition before Maddocks the next day 
to these facts. An attempt at murder caused a 



20 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

great sensation in the principality, where not even 
a robbery had taken place for twenty years. No 
clue could be found to unravel the mystery ; and 
the opinion generally was, that the whole scene 
was the effect of imagination. Mr. Maddocks, like 
all who ever knew Shelley, perfectly idolized him — 
nor without reason. During Maddocks's absence 
in London, an extraordinary tide menaced that 
truly Roman undertaking, his embankment against 
the sea. Shelley, always ready to be of service 
to his friends, heading a paper with a subscription 
of 500/., took it himself to all the neighbourhood, 
and raised, for the use of Mr. Maddocks, a con- 
siderable sum, which prevented this colossal work 
from being demolished. I cite this, as I might do 
many other instances of his active benevolence. 
This extreme generosity often led him into great 
pecuniary embarrassments; and some years after- 
wards he suffered, in all its horrors, the evils of 
distress. He at length succeeded in borrowing some 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 21 

money from the Jews. In the early part of his life 
no man was so improvident as Shelley — his heart 
and purse were alike open to all. He knew I was 
much attached to a young person whom prudential 
motives prevented my marrying. To do away with 
this obstacle, he earnestly proposed (which of course 
I declined) to raise a sum of money on a post obit, 
and settle it on the lady. Some one has said, that 
he would have divided his last sixpence with a 
friend : I say, that he would have given it to a 
stranger in distress. 

Shelley's ill-assorted marriage contributed, as 
might have been foreseen, to the misery of both 
parties. 

Some of the outpourings of his soul on this fatal 
union were these : — 

" What is love ? Ask him who lives, what is 
life — ask him who adores, what is God. I know 
not the internal constitution of other men. I see 
that in some external attributes they resemble me ; 



22 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

but when, misled by that appearance, I have thought 
to appeal to something in common, and unburthen 
my inmost soul, I have found my language mis- 
understood, like one in a distant and savage land. 
The more opportunities they have afforded me for 
experience, the wider has appeared the interval 
between us, and to a greater distance have the 
points of sympathy been withdrawn. 

" With a spirit ill fitted to sustain such proofs, 
trembling and feeble through its tenderness, I have 
everywhere sought, and have found only repulse 
and disappointment. Thou demandest, What is 
love ? If we reason, we would be understood : if we 
imagine, we would that the airy children of our 
brain were born anew within another's : if we feel, 
we would that another's nerves should vibrate to 
our own, — that the beams of her eyes should kindle 
at once, and mix and melt into our own, — that lips 
of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering 
and burning with the heart's best food. This is 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 



23 



love; — this is the bond and the sanction which 
connects not only the two sexes, but everything 
that exists. 

" We are born into the world, and there is some- 
thing within us which, from the instant we live and 
move, thirsts after its likeness. This propensity 
developes itself with the developement of our nature 
— to this eagerly refer all sensations thirsting that 
they should resemble or correspond with it. The 
discovery of its antetype — the meeting with an 
understanding capable of clearly estimating the 
deductions of our own — an imagination which can 
enter into, and seize upon the subtle and delicate 
peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish, 
and unfold in secret — with a frame whose nerves, 
like the chords of two exquisite lyres strung to the 
accompaniment of one delightful voice, vibrate with 
the vibration of our own — -and of a combination of 
all these in such proportion as the type within 
demands, — this is the invisible and unattainable 



24 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

point to which love tends ; and to attain which it 
urges forth the powers of man to arrest the faintest 
shadow of that without which there is no rest or 
respite to the heart over which it rules. Hence, 
in solitude, or in that deserted state when we are 
surrounded by human beings, and yet they sym- 
pathize not with us, we love the flowers, and the 
grass, and the waters, and the sky. In the motion 
of the very leaves of spring — in the blue air there 
is found a secret correspondence with our heart 
that awakens the spirits to a dance of breathless 
rapture, and brings tears of mysterious tenderness 
to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, 
or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone. 

" Sterne says, that, if he were in a desert, he 
would love some cypress. So soon as this want or 
power is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of 
himself, and what yet survives is the mere wreck 
of what he was." 

Is there anything in the writings of Rousseau 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 25 

that can compare with the tenderness, with the elo- 
quence of passion, contained in these aspirations ? 

What disappointed hopes gave birth to them we 
may more than conjecture. It was with such 
lacerated and withered feelings that he sate down 
to trace the wanderings of Alastor, and, under the 
idealism of the spirit of solitude, to paint his own 
vain and fruitless search of a being with whom he 
could sympathize, and render this earth, what, in 
his enthusiastic admiration of nature, I have often 
heard him call it, a paradise. 

In looking back to his first marriage, it is sur- 
prising, not that it should have ended in a separa- 
tion, but that he should have continued to drag for 
more than three years the matrimonial chain, every 
link of which was a protraction of torture. That 
separation, for which there were other and more 
serious grounds, into which I shall not enter, took 
place by mutual consent, and, considering himself 
free, he resolved to go abroad. His health, always 



26 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 



delicate, was impaired by the misery he had under- 
gone, and the quantity of that beverage, other than 
a Lethean one to him, laudanum, which he had 
taken. He required change of scene, and a milder 
climate; and on the 28th July, 1814, commenced 
a continental tour. He crossed the Channel in an 
open boat, and had a very narrow escape of being 
upset in a sudden squall. Passing a few days in 
Paris, he received a small remittance ; and after 
talking over with his party, and rejecting many 
plans, fixed on one eccentric enough — to walk 
through France — went to the Marche des Herbes, 
bought an ass, and thus started for Charenton : 
there, finding the quadruped too weak to carry his 
portmanteau, he made the purchase of a mule, and 
not without many adventures arrived with this sin- 
gular equipage at Troyes. 

The desolation and ruin that the Cossacks left 
everywhere behind them in their pestilential march 
— the distress of the inhabitants, whose houses had 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 27 

been so lately burned, their cattle killed, and their 
all destroyed, made a deep impression on Shelley's 
feeling mind, and gave a sting to his detestation of 
war and despotism. 

Further pedestrianism being rendered impossible 
by a sprained ancle, the remainder of the journey 
to Neuchatel was performed par voiture. Lucerne 
was the next canton visited : coasting its romantic 
lake up to Brunen, the chateau was hired for a 
week. But finding he had only 28/. left, and no 
chance of further remittances till December, he 
resolved with that small sum to return home by the 
Reuss and the Rhine. Shelley and his party took 
the coche d'eaii for Loffenburgh : thence to Mumph 
the passage was made in a narrow, long flat- 
bottomed machine, consisting of pieces of deal 
nailed together. " The river is rapid, and sped 
swiftly, breaking as it passed over rocks just covered 
by the water. It was a sight of some dread to see 
the frail boat winding along the eddies of the rocks, 



28 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

which it was death to touch, and where the slightest 
inclination on one side would instantly have overset 
it." However, this punt brought them in safety to 
Basle, where, hiring a boat for Mayence, they bade 
adieu to Switzerland ; and landed in England from 
Rotterdam on the 13th August, having travelled 
800 miles at an expense of less than 30/. Shelley 
used to describe with an enthusiasm that was infec- 
tious, the rapturous enjoyment this voyage down 
the Rhine was to him ; — to dilate with all the fire 
of poetic inspiration, on the rapidity of their descent 
of that torrent-like river — winding now along banks 
of vines, or greenest pastures — now rushing past 
craggy heights surmounted by feudal castles. 

This was one of the favourite topics in which 
he delighted to intoxicate his imagination ; and, 
with a prodigality, like that of Nature in some 
tropical island, to lavish a world of wealth, as 
though his store was inexhaustible as hers. 

The next eighteen months after his return were 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 29 

passed almost exclusively in London, where he had 
to suffer all the horrors of poverty. It was at this 
time, I imagine, that he walked the hospitals, and 
studied medicine, not with any intention of prac- 
tising it as a profession, but with a view of alle- 
viating the sufferings of humanity. His knowledge 
of anatomy was very limited ; but he made himself 
a tolerable botanist. I doubt, however, whether 
Shelley had not too much imagination to make any 
great proficiency in the abstract sciences : nature 
and education both designed him for a poet. 

In May 1816, Shelley paid a second visit to the 
continent, and reached Secheron, near Geneva, on 
the 17th of that month. On his arrival he learned, 
that Byron was living in the Hotel. Some corre- 
spondence on the subject of e Queen Mab' had 
already passed between himself and Shelley : it 
was renewed, and in their interview they were so 
mutually pleased with each other, that it ended 
in Shelley's deciding to take a villa immediately 



30 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

at the foot of that already taken by Lord Byron, 
the Campagne Diodati, — a name associated with 
that of Milton, and perhaps one of Childe Harold's 
principal reasons for choosing it as a residence. 
The cottage occupied by Shelley is in a most 
sequestered spot. There is no access to it in a 
carriage. It stands only separated from the lake 
by a small garden, much overgrown by trees. A 
pathway through the vineyard of Diodati com- 
municates with it. It was here that Byron formed 
an attachment to the mother of Allegra. They 
were not altogether strangers, he having seen her 
once on the eve of his departure for the continent, 
when she applied to him for an engagement at 
Drury Lane ; but he was no longer on the Com- 
mittee of the theatre, and could not forward her 
views. I have already spoken of C — — ■. She was 
a brunette, and gifted with no common talents, 
and, if I may judge by what she was six years 
afterwards, possessed at that time no common 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 31 

beauty. This liaison was, however, of very short 
duration ; — but to return to Shelley. 

At Geneva, then, commenced that friendship 
between Shelley and Byron, that was destined to 
contribute so much to their mutual advantage, and 
to soothe their after regrets, if such they enter- 
tained, for their lost native land. 

The similarity of their destinies tended not a 
little to cement this intimacy. Both were marks 
for the world's obloquy — both were self-exiled. 
Their pursuits were congenial — they had 

Been cradled into poetry by wrong, 
And learnt by suffering what they taught in song. 

They both sought and found in solitude, and 
Nature — to whom the Greeks rightly gave the 
name of mother, — a balm for their wounded spirits. 
It cannot, I think, be denied, that the benefit of 
this intimacy weighed much on the side of Byron. 
That he profited by the superior reading and refined 
taste of Shelley, is evident from all he wrote in 



32 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

Switzerland. There is a higher strain- of poetry — 
a depth of thought, of feeling — a natural piety — 
in the third canto of Childe Harold, which we do 
not find in his previous works. These must be 
attributed, in some measure, to the influence this 
daily intercourse had over his mind. Byron took 
as much pleasure in the society of Shelley as he 
was capable of taking (and he certainly was very 
social in Italy,) in that of any one, and soon enter- 
tained the greatest deference for Shelley's judg- 
ment, which, in the compositions of others, was 
infallible. With Shelley, Byron disagreed in many 
essential points ; but they never came to a differ- 
ence — which was the case with few of his pseudo- 
friends. Mr. Hobhouse and himself were always 
best apart; and it was a relief to him when they 
finally separated in Greece. A cold, calculating, 
unoriginal, mathematical mind, could have little in 
common with Byron's ; but Shelley's was an El 
Dorado, an inexhaustible mine. Byron, (as in the 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 33 

case of Charles Skinner Matthews, of whom he 
used to talk so much, and regretted so deeply,) not 
being a great reader himself, liked the company of 
those who were, — especially if they could think, 
for he thus obtained both the matter and spirit 
distilled through the alembic of others' brains. His 
admiration of Shelley's talents and acquirements 
only yielded to an esteem for his virtues ; and (I 
think from what I witnessed five years after- 
wards,) to have passed a day without seeing him, 
would have seemed a lost day. No wonder, then, 
that in this absolute retirement they were in- 
separable. They spent their mornings on the 
lake — their evenings in their own small intel- 
lectual circle ; and thus, as Byron said, he passed 
that summer more rationally than any other 
period of his life. He had before written for 
fame : here, he was inspired by a higher feeling. 
Madame Belloe, in her ' Life of Lord Byron,' 
has given a journal of his tour in the smaller 



34 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

cantons ; where are to be found all the elements 
of l Manfred. ' 

Shelley, in some interesting letters addressed to 
his friend Mr. Peacock, describes a Tour du Lac, 
which he made with Lord Byron. Off Miellerie 
they were in great danger of being lost. He says, 
" It blew tremendously, and came from the remotest 
extremity of the lake, producing waves of frightful 
height, and covered the whole surface with a chaos 
of foam. My companion, an excellent swimmer, 
took off his coat : I did the same, and we sate 
with our arms crossed, every instant expecting to 
be swamped. My feelings would have been less 
painful had I been alone, for I was overcome with 
humiliation, when I thought that his life might be 
risked to save mine." Shelley dwells with rapture 
on the scenes of the * Nouvelle Heloise,' which he 
calls an overflowing of sublimest genius, and more 
than human sensibility. On visiting Clarens he 
says, " Why did the cold maxims of the world 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 35 

compel me, at this moment, to repress the tears of 
melancholy transport which it would have been so 
sweet to indulge, immeasurably, even until the 
darkness of night had swallowed up the objects that 
excited them." At Lausanne, whilst walking on 
the Acacia-shaded terrace belonging to Gibbon's 
house, he observes, " Gibbon had a cold and un- 
impassioned spirit. I never felt more inclination 
to rail at the prejudices which cling to such a 
thing, than now that Julie and Clarens, Lausanne 
and the Roman Empire, compel me to a contrast 
between Rousseau and Gibbon." 

At the end of July he went to Chamouni, where 
at the foot of Mont Blanc were composed his 
sublime lines on the source of the Arveiron ; which 
rest their claim to admiration on an attempt to 
imitate the untameable wildness and inaccessible 
solemnity from which those feelings sprang. 

Of the Mer de Glace he speaks thus : " I will 
not pursue BufFon's grand but gloomy theory, that 



36 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 



this globe which we inhabit will at some future 
period be changed into a mass of frost, by the 
encroachments of the polar ice, and of that pro- 
duced on the most elevated points of the earth. 
* * * Imagine to yourself Ahriman throned among 
these desolating snows — among these palaces of 
death and frost, so sculptured in this their terrible 
magnificence by the adamantine hand of necessity, 
and that he casts around him, as the first essays of 
his final usurpation, avalanches, torrents, rocks, 
and glaciers, at once the proofs and symbols of 
his reign; add to this, the degradation of the 
human species, who, in these regions, are half 
deformed, or idiotic, and most of whom are de- 
prived of anything that can excite interest or 
admiration. This is a part of the subject more 
mournful and less sublime, but such as neither 
the poet nor the philosopher should disdain to 
regard. One would imagine Mont Blanc, like 
the god of the Stoics, was a vast animal, and 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 37 

that the frozen blood for ever circulated through 
his stony veins." 

What his real opinion of Byron's genius was, 
may be collected from a sonnet he once showed 
me, and which the subject of it never saw. The 
sentiments accord well with that diffidence of his 
own powers — that innate modesty which always 
distinguished him. It began thus— 

If I esteemed him less, envy would kill 
Pleasure, and leave to wonder and despair 
The ministration of the thoughts that fill 
My soul, which, as a worm may haply share 
A portion of the unapproachable, 
Marks his creations rise as fast and fair 
As perfect worlds at the Creator's will. 

Shelley used to say, that reading Dante pro- 
duced in him the same despair. He was at this 
period oT his life, and continued ever, a warm 
admirer of the Lakists, especially of Wordsworth 
and Coleridge. But he was a still greater lover of 
jEschyrus and Goethe. He read to Lord Byron 



38 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 



the 'Prometheus,' (of which I shall have occasion 
to speak hereafter,) and 'Faust,' from which was 
derived the idea of ' Manfred,' — though he has 
treated that drama in such a way, that Goethe's 
loud accusations were by no means well founded. 
Among all his poetical crimes, Shelley has never 
been taxed with plagiarism. 

It was one of his fanciful notions, that what we 
call talent, is in some degree magnetic, or epi- 
demic : that spirits catch from each other a particle 
of the mens divinior. Such an idea, if not to be 
found in Plato, is worthy of him. This divine 
author he had long made his constant companion, 
and ended in idolizing. It was probably to the 
1 Phsedo' that he owed his conversion from ma- 
terialism. 

" Whatever may be the true and final destination 
of man," writes Shelley, "there is a spirit within 
him at variance with nothingness and decay. This 
is the character of all life and being. Each is at 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 39 

once the centre and circumference, — the point to 
which all things are resolved, and the line within 
which all things are contained. Such contempla- 
tions materialism and the popular philosophy of 
mind and matter alike forbid. They are consistent 
only with the intellectual system." 

But, though congenial in their pursuits, there 
was little congeniality of sentiment between Shelley 
and Byron on these subjects. Byron was doubtless 
a sceptic; but why, he scarcely knew, or dared ask 
himself. Almost all his friends at Cambridge had 
been sceptics ; and he had been rather laughed out 
of his faith than convinced, by inquiry or argu- 
ment, of its fallacy. We next find Shelley at Como, 
where he composed his eclogue of ' Rosalind and 
Helen,' which glows with all the enchanting scenery 
of that delicious summer retreat. Though deficient 
as a story, this tale abounds with isolated passages 
of beauty, such as are not to be surpassed in our 
or any language. One would imagine that Byron, 



40 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 



when, on the banks of the Brenta, he wrote the 
stanza — 

A single star is by her side, — 

had in his mind's eye the still more exquisite lines 

from ' Rosalind and Helen' — 

Leading the infantine moon, 
And that one star which to her 
Seems as if to minister 
Half the golden light she brings 
From the sunset's radiant springs. 

Shelley remained on the Lake of Como during 
the summer of 1817. 

It was to a vivid remembrance of these romantic 
excursions that we owe the scenes in the ' Revolt 
of Islam.' He there crowds images on images, 
each more lovely and fantastic than the former, 
illustrating one by the other, till he almost forgets, 
and his readers hardly wish to remember, in the 
enchantment which his magic wand calls up, that 
he is wandering from his theme. But I fear I am 
doing so myself, and shall land him again, after an 
absence of a year and some months, in England, 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 41 

Shelley was at Bath in November 1817, when 
an event occurred which was destined to darken 
the remainder of his existence ; or, in his own 
words, written about this period, when for him 

Black despair, 
The shadow of a starless night, was thrown 
Over the world. 

This event, upon which I could wish to throw a 
veil, was the death of his wife under the most 
distressing circumstances. Her fate was a dreadful 
misfortune, to him who survived, and her who 
perished. It is impossible to acquit Shelley of all 
blame in this calamity. From the knowledge of 
her character, and her unfitness for self-govern- 
ment, he should have kept an eye over her conduct. 
But if he was blameable, her relations were still 
more so; and, having confided her to their care, 
he might consider, with many others similarly 
circumstanced, that his responsibility was at an 
end. That he did not do so, his compunction, 



42 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

which brought on a temporary derangement, proves ; 
and yet was it not most barbarous in a reviewer 
to gangrene the wounds which his sensitive spirit 
kept ever open ? How pathetically does he, in a 
dirge not unworthy of Shakspeare, addressed to 
whom I know not, give vent to his agonized 
heart : 

That time is dead for ever, child— 
Drowned, frozen, dead for ever ; 

We look on the past, 

And stare aghast, 
At the spectres, wailing, pale and ghast, 
Of hopes that thou and I beguiled 

To death on Life's dark river. 

"Ate does not die childless," says the Greek 
dramatist. A scarcely less misfortune, consequent 
on this catastrophe, was the barbarous decree of 
the Court of Chancery, unhappily since made 
a precedent, by which he was deprived of his 
children, had them torn from him and consigned 
to strangers. 

The grounds upon which this act of oppression 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 43 

and cruelty, only worthy of the most uncivilized 

nations, was founded, — 

Trial 
I think they call it, — 

was decided against him upon the evidence, if such 
it can be called, of a printed copy of l Queen 
Mab,' which, in his preface to 'Alastor,' he dis- 
claimed any intention of publishing. It is said 
that he was called upon, by the court, to recant 
the opinions contained in that work. Shelley was 
the last man in existence to recant any opinion 
from fear : and a fiat worse than death was the 
consequence — sundering all the dearest ties of 
humanity. 

Byron told me, that (well knowing Shelley could 
not exist without sympathy) it was by his per- 
suasion that Shelley married again. None who 
have the happiness of knowing Mrs, Shelley can 
wonder at that step. But in 1812, a year and a 
half after his first marriage, that he continued to 



44 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

think with Plato on the subject of wedlock is 
clear, from a letter addressed to Sir James Law- 
rence, who had sent him his l History of the Nairs.' 
Shelley says, " I abhor seduction as much as I 
adore love ; and if I have conformed to the usages 
of the world on the score of matrimony, it is that 
disgrace always attaches to the weaker sex." An 
irresistible argument.* 

His short residence at Marlow has been already 
described. There he led a quiet, retired, domestic 
life, and has left behind him a character for bene- 
volence and charity, that still endears him to its 
inhabitants. 

* Has a woman obeyed the impulse of unerring nature, 
society declares war against- her— pityless and unerring war. 
She must be the tame slave ; she must make no reprisals : 
theirs is the right of persecution, hers the duty of endurance. 
She lives a life of infamy. The loud and bitter laugh of scorn 
scares her from all return. She dies of long and lingering 
disease; yet she is in fault. She is the criminal — she the fro- 
ward, the untameable child; — and society, forsooth, the pure 
and virtuous matron, who casts her as an abortion from he* 
undefiled bosom.— Shelley. 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 45 

He became about this time acquainted with 
Keats ; and Shelley told me that it was a friendly 
rivalry between them, which gave rise to ' Endy- 
mion' and the ' Revolt of Islam,' — two poems 
scarcely to, be named in the same sentence. 
Shelley was too classical — had too much good taste 
— to have fallen into the sickly affectation — the 
obsoletas scribendi formas of that perverse and 
limited school. f The ( Revolt of Islam' must be 



+ The following note, by the Editor of the Athenceum, was 
appended to this passage on its publication in that paper : — 

" Nothing is more ridiculous, than a running commentary, 
wherein an editor apologizes for, or dissents from, the opinions 
of a writer in his own paper. Occasions, however, may arise 
to excuse, if not to justify, such disclaimer ; and for self-satis- 
faction we enter our protest on this occasion. We go as far 
as Captain Medwin in admiration of Shelley ; but as far as 
Shelley — " infallible," says the Captain, " in his judgment of 
the works of others"— in admiration of Keats. Shelley was a 
worshipper of Truth— Keats of Beauty ; Shelley had the greater 
power— Keats the finer imagination : both were single-hearted, 
sincere, admirable men. When we look into the world,— nay, 
not to judge others, when we look into our own hearts, and see 
how certainly manhood shakes hands with worldliness, we 
should despair, if such men did not occasionally appear among 



46 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

looked upon as the greatest effort of any individual 
mind, (whatever may be its defects,) in one at the 

us. Shelley and Keats were equal enthusiasts — had the same 
hopes of the moral improvement of society— of the certain in- 
fluence of knowledge — and of the ultimate triumph of truth; 
— and Shelley, who lived longest, carried all the generous 
feelings of youth into manhood ; age enlarged, not narrowed his 
sympathies; and learning bowed down his humanity to feel 
its brotherhood with the humblest of his fellow- creatures. If 
not judged by creeds and conventional opinions, Shelley must 
be considered as a moral teacher both by precept and example : 
he scattered the seed of truth, so it appeared to him, every 
where, and upon all occasions,— confident that, however dis- 
regarded, however long it might lie buried, it would not perish, 
but spring up hereafter in the sunshine of welcome, and its 
golden fruitage be garnered by grateful men. Keats had 
naturally much less of this political philosophy ; but he had 
neither less resolution, less hope of, or less good-will towards 
man. Lord Byron's opinion, that he was killed by the re- 
viewers, is wholly ridiculous; though his epitaph, and the 
angry feelings of his friends, might seem to countenance it. 
Keats died of hereditary consumption, and was fast sinking 
before either Blackivood or the Quarterly poured out their 
malignant venom. Even then it came but as a mildew upon 
his generous nature, injuring the leaves and blossoms, but 
leaving untouched the heart within, the courage to dare and to 
suffer. Keats (we speak of him in health and vigour,) had a 
resolution, not only physical but moral, greater than any man 
we ever knew : it was unshakable by everything but his affec- 
tions. We are not inclined to stretch this note into an essay, 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 47 

same period of life. I do not forget Milton, or 
Chatterton, or Pope, when I say this. It occupied 
him only six months. The dedicating lines lose 
nothing in comparison with Byron's to Ian the ; 
and the structure of his Spenserian stanzas, in har- 
mony and the varied flow of the versification, may 
serve as a model for all succeeding writers in that 
metre. 

Early in the spring of 1818, various reasons in- 
duced Shelley again to quit England, with scarcely 
a hope or wish to revisit it. The breach between 
himself and his relatives had been made irreparable. 
He was become fatherless — he was highly un- 
popular from the publicity given to the trial — 
from the attacks of the reviewing churchmen on 
his works ; and his health was gradually becoming 

and shall not therefore touch on the ' Endymion' further than 
to say, that Captain Medwin cannot produce anything in the 
' Revolt of Islam' superior to the Hymn to Pan ; nor in the 
English language anything written by any poet at the same 
age with which it may not stand in honourable comparison." 



48 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

worse. The vegetable system which he followed, 
as to diet, did not agree with his constitution, and 
he was finally obliged to abandon it. That he was 
a Pythagorean from principle, is proved by the 
very luminous synopsis of all the arguments in 
its favour, contained in a note appended to ' Queen 
Mab.' He was of opinion, and I agree with him 
and the disciples of that school, that abstinence 
from animal food subtilizes and clears the intel- 
lectual faculties. For all the sensualities of the 
table Shelley had an ineffable contempt, and, like 
Newton, used sometimes to inquire if he had dined 
— a natural question from a Berkleyist. 

But to follow him in his travels — a more in- 
teresting topic. He passed rapidly through France 
and Switzerland, and, crossing the Mont Cenis 
into Italy, paid a visit to Lord Byron at Venice, 
where he made a considerable stay. 

Under the names of Julian and Maddalo, written 
at Rome some months afterwards, Shelley paints 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 49 

himself and Byron in that city. The sketch is 
highly valuable. He says of Byron, at this time, 
" He is cheerful, frank, and witty : his more serious 
conversation a sort of intoxication ; men are held 
by it as a spell" : — of himself, that he " was at- 
tached to that philosophical sect that assert the 
power of man over his own mind, and the immense 
improvements of which, by the extinction of cer- 
tain moral superstitions, human society may be 
made susceptible." I shall enter more at large 
hereafter on Shelley's particular theories, though 
they are somewhat subtle and difficult of ana- 
lysis. 

Venice was a place peculiarly adapted to the 
studious life Shelley loved to lead. 

The town is silent— one may write 
Or read in gondolas by day or night, 
Unseen, uninterrupted. Books are there — 
Pictures, and casts from all the statues fair, 
That are twin-born with poetry ; and all 
We seek in towns ; with little to recall 
Regrets for the green country. 



50 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

In the autumn we find Shelley at Naples. For- 
tune did not seem tired of persecuting him, for he 
became the innocent actor in a tragedy here, more 
extraordinary than any to be found in the pages 
of romance. The story, as he related it to myself 
and Byron, would furnish perfect materials for a 
novel in three volumes, and cannot be condensed 
into a few sentences, marvellous as the scenes of 
that drama were. Events occur daily, and have 
happened to myself, far more incredible than any 
which the most disordered fancy can conjure up, 
casting " a shade of falsehood" on the records of 
what are called reality. Certain it is, that Shelley, 
as may be judged from his ' Lines written in 
Despondency,' must have been most miserable at 
Naples. No one could have poured forth those 
affecting stanzas, but with a mind, as he says in 
the l Cenci,' hovering on the devouring edge of 
darkness. His departure from Naples was, he said, 
precipitated by this event ; and he passed the en- 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 51 

suing winter at Rome. There is something in- 
spiring in the very atmosphere of Rome. Is it 
fanciful, that heing encircled by images of beauty 
— that in contemplating works of beauty such as 
Rome and the Vatican only can boast — that by 
gazing on the scattered limbs of that mighty co- 
lossus, whose shadow eclipsed the world, — we 
should catch a portion of the sublime — become a 
portion of that around us ? 

Certain it is, that artists produce at Rome, what 
they are incapable of conceiving elsewhere, and at 
which themselves, are most sincerely astonished. 
No wonder, then, that Shelley should have here 
surpassed himself in giving birth to two of his 
greatest works, so different in themselves, the 
' Cenci' and the ' Prometheus Unbound.' He 
drenched his spirit to intoxication in the deep blue 
sky of Rome. His favourite haunts were the ruined 
Baths of Caracalla, or the labyrinths of the Coli- 
seum, where he laid the first scene of a tale which 



52 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

promised to rival, if not surpass l Corinne.' Like 
Byron in ' Childe Harold,' or Madame De Stael, 
he meant to have idealized himself in the principal 
character. This exquisite fragment he allowed me 
to copy ; and during the twelve months I passed at 
Rome, I read it as many times, sitting, as he says, 
on some isolated capital of a fallen column in the 
Arena, and each time with an increased delight. 

Shelley's taste and feeling in works of ancient 
art were, as might be expected, most refined. Sta- 
tuary was his passion. He contended, " that the 
slaughter-house and dissecting-room were not the 
sources whence the Greeks drew their perfection. 
It was to be attributed to the daily exhibition of the 
human form in all its symmetry in their Gymnasia. 
Their sculptors were not mere mechanicians : they 
were citizens and soldiers animated with the love 
of their country. We must rival them in their 
virtue before we can come up to them in their 
compositions." The hard, harsh, affected style of 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 53 

the French school and Canova, he could never 
endure ; and used to contrast what are considered 
the masterpieces of the latter with those of the age 
of Pericles, where the outline of form and features 
is, as in one of Sir Joshua Reynolds's paintings, 
so soft as to be scarcely traceable by the eye. He 
considered the Perseus, which Forsyth so ridicu- 
lously overpraised, a bad imitation of the Apollo ; 
and said, after seeing the great conceited figurante 
of the Pitti, " go and visit the modest little creature 
of the Tribune." 

Shelley used to say that he did not understand 
painting, — not meaning that he was insensible to 
the beauty of the pictures — (of the incomparable 
Raphael, for instance, whom I have often thought 
Shelley much resembled, not only in face, but 
genius, though it was differently directed,) — but 
that he did not know the style of different masters 
— the peculiarities of different schools. This he 
thought only to be acquired by long experience 



54 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 



and observation, a retentive memory of minutiae, 
the faculty of comparison : whereas sculpture re- 
quires no previous study ; and of which the Roman 
peasant is perhaps as good a judge as the best 
academician or anatomist. 

From Rome, in 1819, Shelley returned to Flo- 
rence. The view from the Boboli Gardens he thus 
describes : " You see below, Florence, a smokeless 
city, with its domes and spires occupying the vale, 
and beyond, to the right, the Apennines, whose 
base extends even to the walls ; and whose sum- 
mits are intersected by ashen-coloured clouds. The 
green vallies of these mountains, which gently un- 
fold themselves upon the plains, and the inter- 
vening hills, covered with vineyards and olive 
plantations, are occupied by the villas, which are, 
as it were, another city — a Babylon of palaces and 
gardens. In the midst of the picture rolls the 
Arno, now full with the winter rains, through 
woods, and bounded by aerial snowy summits of 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 55 

the Apennines. On the right, a magnificent but- 
tress of lofty craggy hills overgrown with wilder- 
ness, juts out in many shapes over a lovely valley, 
and approaches the walls of the city. 

" Cascini and other villages occupy the pinnacles 
and abutments of these hills, over which is seen, at 
intervals, the ethereal mountain line, hoary with 
snow, and intersected by clouds. The valley below 
is covered with cypress groves, whose obeliskine 
forms of intense green pierce the grey shadow of 
the wintry hill that overhangs them. The cy- 
presses, too, of the garden, form a magnificent 
foreground of accumulated verdure : pyramids of 
dark green and shining cones, rising out of a mass, 
between which are cut, like caverns, recesses con- 
ducting into walks." 

Shelley, while at Florence, passed much of his 
time in the Gallery, where, after his severe mental 
labours, his imagination reposed and luxuriated 
amid the divine creations of the Greeks. The 



o6 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

Niobe, the Venus Anadyomine, the group of 
Bacchus and Ampelus, were the objects of his in- 
exhaustible and insatiable admiration. On these I 
have heard him expatiate with all the eloquence 
of poetic enthusiasm. He had made ample notes 
on the wonders of art in this Gallery, from which, 
on my leaving Pisa, he allowed me to make 
extracts, far surpassing in eloquence anything 
Winkelman has left on this subject. 

In this city, also, he saw one of those republics 
that opposed for some time a systematic and effec- 
tual resistance to all the surrounding tyranny of 
Popedom and despotism. The Lombard League 
defeated the armies of the despot in the field, and 
until Florence was betrayed into the hands of 
those polished tyrants, the Medici, " freedom had 
one citadel where it could find refuge from a world 
that was its foe." 

To this cause he attributed the undisputed supe- 
riority of Italy, in literature and the arts, above all 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 



57 



its cotemporaries — the union, and energy, and 
beauty, which distinguish from all other poets the 
writings of Dante — that restlessness of fervid 
power, which surpassed itself in painting and 
sculpture, and from which Raphael and Michael 
Angelo drew their inspiration. 

Here Shelley would probably have taken up a 
permanent residence, but that the winds that sweep 
from the Apennines were too keen for his nerves. 
After passing some months at Leghorn and the 
Baths of Lucca, he finally fixed himself at Pisa, 
where, in the tenderness of affection and sympathy 
of her who partook of his genius, and could appre- 
ciate his transcendent talents, he sought for that 
repose in domestic retirement, which the persecu^- 
tions of fortune, and a life chequered by few rays 
of sunshine, had as yet denied him. 

In the autumn of 1 820 I accepted Shelley's in- 
vitation to winter with him at Pisa. He had been 
passing part of the summer among the chesnut 



58 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

forests of that delicious retreat — the baths of 
Lucca; and I found him at those of St. Julian, at 
the foot of the mountain, which Dante calls the 
Screen of Lucca. A few days after my arrival, 
we were driven from his house by the overflowing 
of the Serchio, and migrated to the south side of 
the Arno, at Pisa, next door to the Marble Palace, 
with the mystical inscription " Alia Giornata." 
Shelley complained of his health : his nerves 
seemed dreadfully shattered ; but his appearance 
was youthful, — nay, almost boyish, although his 
hair (which had a natural wave) was mixed with 
grey. A few weeks only had elapsed since a sin- 
gular, and almost incredible and dastardly outrage 
had been committed on him. He was at the post- 
office asking for his letters, when a stranger, on 

hearing his name, said, M What ! are you that 

atheist Shelley?" and without more preamble, 
being a tall powerful man, struck him a blow 
which felled to the ground and stunned him. On 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 59 

coming to himself, Shelley found that the villain 
had disappeared. Raging with the insult, he im- 
mediately sought his friend Mr. Tighe, who lost 
no time in taking measures to obtain satisfaction. 
Mr. Tighe was some time in discovering the hotel 
at which the cowardly aggressor had put up, but 
at length traced him to the Donzelli. It seems that 
he was an Englishman, and an officer in the Por- 
tuguese service : his name I have now forgotten. 

He had, however, started for Genoa, whither 
Mr. Tighe and Shelley followed, but without being 
able to overtake him, or learn his route from that 
city. This anecdote will show the feeling of ani- 
mosity which the malice of Shelley's enemies had 
excited against him in the breasts of his compa- 
triots ; — but the time is happily past when Quar- 
terly Reviews can deal out damnation, or that they 
can drive out of the pale of society, or point out as 
a mad dog to be knocked on the head, any one 
who does not happen to profess the same creed as 



60 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

themselves. How little did the reverend writer of 
that article know of Shelley, when he says that 
" from childhood he (Shelley) has carried about 
with him a soured and discontented spirit — un- 
tractable as a boy, and unamiable in youth — queru- 
lous and unmanly in all three." But as if this 
foul nomenclature was inexhaustible, the critic 
ends by taxing him with " low fraud, cold selfish- 
ness, and unmanly cruelty." Are such libellers to 
pass with impunity ? Is this proper and decorous 
language from a clergyman ? 

Shelley's whole time was dedicated to study. 
He was then reading Calderon, and mad about the 
Autos ; but he did not the more lay aside his 
favourite authors, the Greek dramatists : a volume 
of Sophocles he used to take with him in his 
rambles : he generally had a book even at dinner, 
if his abstemious meal could be called one ;* and 

* The reason for Byron's abstemiousness was a very different 
one from Shelley's. Like his late Majesty, Byron was horrified 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 61 

told me he always took a book to bed with him. 
In the evenings he sometimes read aloud a canto 
of Dante or Tasso, or a canzone of Petrarch. 
Though his voice was somewhat broken in the 
sound, his recitation of poetry was wonderfully 
effective, and the tones of his voice of varied 
modulation. He entered into the soul of his 
author, and penetrated those of his listeners. 

Prince Mavrocordato was his daily, almost his 
only visitor. It was with peculiar delight that I 
listened to Shelley's spirited and poetical version 

at the idea of getting fat ; and to counteract this tendency of 
his to corpulency, mortified his Epicurean propensities. Hence 
he dined four days in the week on fish and vegetables ; and 
had e~ven stinted himself, when I last saw him, to a pint of 
claret. 

Naturam expellasfurca, tamen usque recurret. 

Thus his sensuality broke out now and then; and I have 
seen him eat of as great a variety of dishes, as a German at a 
table d'hbte. He succeeded, it is true, in overmastering nature, 
and clipping his rotundity of its fair proportions ; but with it 
shrunk his cheek and his calf. This the Guiccioli observed, 
and seemed by no means to admire Milord's eremitish diet. 



62 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

of the Prometheus and Agamemnon of iEschylus ; 
— in the last of which he used to rave about the 
opening chorus. He was become, as well he might 
be, disgusted with publishing, with seeing poets 
enjoying reputation who did not possess a tithe 
of his genius, and some even of those decking 
themselves out, like daws, in his borrowed plumes. 
He used to say, that as he had failed in original 
compositions, he would translate the ' Prometheus'; 
and it is to be lamented that he did not carry his 
design into effect. His ' Cyclops' of Euripides and 
1 Hymn to Mercury' of Homer, are specimens of 
what his powers as a translator were, and how 
critically he was versed in Greek, and caught the 
true spirit of his authors. Plato he read with all 
the facility of a modern work, and had made a 
translation of the ' Symposium,' — an attempt so 
difficult, that the Germans pretend their language 
is alone capable of mastering it. This splendid 
effort I had hoped Mrs. Shelley would have given 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 63 

the public, having promised, in 1 824, some of his 
posthumous prose works. 

During this winter he wrote little — without en- 
couragement, who can ? One of his poems I must 
not, however, forget to mention, (and perhaps not 
the least exquisite, though it fell dead from the 
press,) the ' Epipsychidion.' This Psyche was the 
Contessina Emilia V. She was an interesting, 
beautiful, and accomplished girl, and immured in 
the odious Convent of St. Anne, by a jealous step- 
mother. 

Shelley was a martyr to a most painful complaint, 
which constantly menaced to terminate fatally, and 
was subject to violent paroxysms, which, to his 
irritable nerves, were each a separate death. I 
had seen magnetism practised in India and at 
Paris, and at his earnest request consented to try 
its efficacy. Mesner himself could not have hoped 
for more complete success. The imposition of my 
hand on his forehead instantaneously put a stop 



64 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

to the spasm, and threw him into a magnetic sleep, 
which, for want of a better word, is called som- 
nambulism. Mrs. Shelley and another lady were 
present. The experiment was repeated more than 
once. 

During his trances I put some questions to him. 
He always pitched his voice in the same tone as 
mine. I inquired about his complaint, and its 
cure — the usual magnetic inquiries. His reply 
was — " What would cure me, would kill me," 
(alluding probably to lithotomy). I am sorry I did 
not note down some of his other answers. Animal 
magnetism is, in Germany, confined by law to the 
medical professors ; and with reason — it is not to 
be trifled with. Shelley afterwards used to walk in 
his sleep; and Mrs. Shelley once found him getting 
up at night, and going to a window. It is remark- 
able, that in the case of the boy Matthew Schwir, 
recorded by Dr. Tritchler, the patient spoke in 
French, as Shelley in Italian. He improvised also 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 65 

verses in Italian, in which language he was never 
known to write poetry. I am aware that in 
England the phenomena of animal magnetism are 
attributed to the imagination. I only state those 
facts that may perhaps shake the incredulity of the 
most sceptical. 

Shelley was afterwards magnetized by a lady, to 
whom he addressed some lines, of which I remember 
some of the stanzas.* 

There has been an imaginary voyage of Lord 
Byron's to Corsica and Sardinia, with the Countess 
Guiccioli and Shelley, published by Galignani, and 
which has passed through several editions. This 
voyage is said to have taken place during the 
winter I passed at Pisa, and which Shelley never 
quitted. The writer of this vision conjures up a 
storm, and makes Shelley so terrified, that he is 
put on shore God knows where. Now, it so hap- 
pens, that Shelley was never so much in his element 
* See Table of Contents for reference to these stanzas. 



66 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

as at sea. Storms were his delight; and when 
at the lake of Geneva, he used to be taken for 
Byron braving Bises in his boat, which none of the 
batteliers could face. 

Shelley was in danger of being lost more than 
once at sea, and had a very narrow escape in 
coming from the Isle of Man in the year 1813 or 
1814. He had taken his passage in a small trading 
craft, which had only three hands on board. It 
was in the month of November, and the weather 
boisterous when they left Douglas, which soon 
increased to a dreadful gale. The Captain attri- 
buted to Shelley's exertions so much the safety of 
his vessel, that he refused, on landing, to accept 
his fare. It is a strange fancy some people have 
to libel the dead, in order to gratify the malignity 7 
of the living. 

It was during my stay with Shelley that the 
Neapolitan insurrection broke out. His ardent 
mind, with a truly poetical, but, unhappily, not a 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 6 7 

prophetic spirit, hailed this as the dawn of Italian 
freedom ; and as the Spanish short-lived revolution 
had inspired him with his magnificent c Psean to 
Liberty,' so he then wrote his i Ode to Naples ;' 
compared with which, those of Collins have always 
seemed to me tame and lifeless. It has the merit 
of being, what few of our English modern odes (ill 
called so) are, really an ode, constructed on the 
model of those left us by Pindar, and worthy of the 
best days of Greece. The Italians are enthusiastic 
in their praise of this ode; — perhaps neither 
Felicaja nor Petrarch have produced any more 
sublime. Shelley could never endure Moore's lines 
against the Neapolitans, beginning, " Yes, down 
to the dust with them/' &c. He used to say that 
such taunts came ill from an Irishman ; and, 
whether merited or no, were cruel and ungenerous. 
Shelley considered Coleridge's ' Ode to Switzer- 
land' as the best in modern times. He knew it 
by heart, and used to declaim it and the/ Ancient 



68 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

Mariner' in his peculiar and emphatic manner. 
Byron knew as little what an ode meant, as he did 
a sonnet — the most difficult of all compositions. 
Shelley's lines beginning, 

Then the ground, 

were not composed on the occasion of the Spanish 
revolution, as they are entitled, but on the Man- 
chester massacre. 

We had many conversations on the subject of 
Keats, who, with a mind and frame alike worn out 
by disappointment and persecution, was come to 
lay his bones in Italy. Shelley was enthusiastic in 
his admiration of ' Hyperion' and the Ode to Pan 
in the ' Endymion* ; but was little partial to Keats 's 
other works. Their correspondence at this period 
would prove highly interesting. Poor Keats died 
three days before I arrived at Rome, in March or 
April 1821; and much of the remainder of that 
year, which Shelley passed at the Baths of St. 
Julian, was occupied on 'Adonais,' which breathes 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 69 

all the tenderness of Moschus and Bion, and loses 
nothing in comparison with those divine produc- 
tions on which it was modelled. Not the least 
valuable part of that Idyll is the picture he has 
drawn of himself, in the two well-known stanzas 
beginning " 'Mid others of less note." How well 
do those expressions, " a pard-like spirit, beautiful 
and swift!" — "a love in desolation marked" — 
" a power girt round with weakness" — designate 
him. 

There is a passage in that elegy which has 
always struck me as among the sublimest in any 
language, though it is rather understood than to 
be explained, like Milton's " Smoothing the raven 
down," &c. 

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, 
Stains the white radiance of eternity, 
Until death tramples it to fragments. 

His great amusement during this summer was, 
with his friend Williams, to navigate the clear and 



70 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 



rapid little river, the Serchio, and the canals that 
branch from it. This chosen companion and par- 
taker of his fate, lived in the place of Pisan Villa- 
giatura, some miles higher up the stream, against 
which Shelley used often to tow his light skiff, in 
order to enjoy the rapidity of the descent. A boat 
was to Shelley what a plaything is to a child — his 
peculiar hobby. He was eighteen when he used 
to float paper ones on the Serpentine ; and I have 
no doubt, at twenty- eight, would have done the 
same with any boy. It was the revival of this 
dormant passion for boat-building which led to the 
fatal project of building a schooner at Genoa, of 
a most dangerous construction: all her ballast, I 
forget how many pounds of lead, being in her 
keel. 

It may be imagined that Shelley was of a melan- 
choly cast of mind — on the contrary, he was natu- 
rally full of playfulness, and remarkable for the 
fineness of his ideas ; and I have never met with 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 71 

any one in whom the brilliance of wit and humour 
was more conspicuous. In this respect he fell 
little short of Byron; and perhaps it was one of 
the great reasons why Byron found such a peculiar 
charm in his conversation. I doubt whether Byron 
could have surpassed him in his Parody on Words- 
worth's ' Peter Bell,' and some other fugitive pieces 
of the same kind, remarkable for a keen sense of 
the ridiculous. 

At the latter end of this year he paid a visit to 
Lord Byron at Ravenna. He was then writing 
1 Cain,' and owes to Shelley the Platonic idea of 
his Hades and the phantasmal worlds — perhaps 
suggested to Shelley himself by Lucian's ' Icaro- 
Menippus.'* 

* Northcote used to take leave of his pupils going on their 
continental tours, with " Now, young man, remember you cross 
the Alps expressly to become a thief." Byron was as little 
scrupulous as the great artist in appropriating to himself the 
works of others ; but he had the ingenuity to select those that 
were in bad repute, and therefore not generally read. Shelley's 
i Queen Mab* and Casti's * Novelle' were two of his favourite 



i ^ MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

It was this visit which decided Byron on win- 
tering at Pisa — a wish to be near Shelley was one 
of his inducements ; independent of which, Tus- 
cany was almost the only State in Italy where a 
foreigner, situated as Byron then was, could find 

cribbing books. I taxed him roundly more than once with 
this habit of his ; and especially of his having plagiarized his 
lines in ' Cain' from 

Earth's distant orb appeared 

The smallest light that twinkles in the heavens ; 

Whilst round the chariot's way 

Innumerable systems rolled, 

And countless spheres diffused 

An ever varying glory, &c 
and of taking c Don Juan' from Casti, passim. '■' I mean," said 
I to him, " one of these days to translate the ' Novelle.' " Byron 
seemed rather alarmed at the idea. " Casti ! why you could 
not have a notion of such a thing? There are not ten English- 
men who have ever read the ' Novelle.' They are a sealed book 
to women. It is in the Pope's Index. The Italians think 
nothing of it."—" What do you think of it, Byron V — " I sha'nt 
tell you," replied he, laughing, and changed the subject. Speak- 
ing of the ' Index Expurgatorius,' Shelley used to tell an amusing 
anecdote of the Roman Dogannieri. On passing the frontier, his 
books were searched with much strictness, and among them 
was a Spinosa and an English Bible. Which do you suppose 
was seized and confiscated ? The Bible ! 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 73 

refuge or safety. The part he took in the affair of 
Romagna, though denied by that veridical article 
in the Westminster Review, is now known ; — nor 
shall I enter into the question how far he was 
wrong in intermeddling with the politics of other 
countries. I bear too great a love for Italy, and 
abhorrence of Austrian despotism, to blame him. 
Had not Cardinal Gonsalvi been then the Pope's 
prime minister, perhaps the stiletto (if he had not 
been openly arrested) would have ended his days. 
Byron's name is still a terror to the despots of 
Italy.* His writings have done much to fan 
the flame of liberty. Shelley used to say that 
poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the 
world. 



* Some months since, being at Genoa, the police, hearing 
that I had been with Byron at Pisa, sent me an order to leave 
the city in twenty-four hours, on the suspicion of my being a 
Carbonaro. It is true, that on my arrival at Turin, our am- 
bassador offered me his protection ; but British officers and 
subjects are now insulted in every petty state. 



74 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

I shall end this part of my sketch with some 
curious observations of his : — 

" In one sense, religion may be called poetry, 
though distorted from the beautiful simplicity of 
its truth. The persons in whom this power abides 
may often, as far as regards many portions of their 
nature, be Atheists; but although they may deny 
and abjure, they are compelled to serve — which is 
seated in the throne of their own soul ; and what- 
ever systems they may professedly support, they 
actually advance the interests of liberty. It is 
impossible to read the productions of our most 
celebrated writers, whatever may be their systems 
relative to thought or expression, without being 
startled by the electric life which there is in their 
words. They measure the circumference and sound 
the depths of human nature, with a comprehensive, 
all-embracing, all-penetrating spirit, at which they 
are themselves most sincerely astonished : it is less 
their own spirit, than the spirit of the age. They 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. ? 5 

are the priests of an unapprehended inspiration — 
the mirror of the gigantic shadow that invests 
them — the echoes of words, of which they conceive 
not the power which they express — the trumpet 
which sounds to battle, and feels not what it 
inspires — the influence that is moved not, but 
moves. Poets and philosophers [he repeats] are 
the unacknowledged legislators of the world." 

It was a strange coincidence, that I should have 
been exposed to the same squall which proved fatal 
to two of my oldest and best friends, Shelley and 
Williams. I embarked on the 2nd of July, with 
a party with whom I was acquainted, on board of 
a vessel they had hired, for Genoa. During the 
first three days of our voyage, we were constantly 
becalmed, lying one whole night off the Pontine 
Marshes, where some of our passengers were at- 
tacked with malaria. On the fourth day set in 
a sirocco, which brought us into the gulph of 
Genoa.' That gulph is subject to violent gusts of 



76 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

wind at all seasons of the year, but more especially 
in the hot months ; and our captain, as the breeze 
died away, foresaw that we should not get into 
port at least that night. Over the Apennines, 
which encircle Genoa as with an amphitheatre, 
hung columns up-piled of dark threatening clouds, 
which soon confirmed his opinion. I forget the 
precise hour at which the squall came on, but 
neither between the Tropics nor on the Line, did 
I ever witness a severer one, and, being accom- 
panied by a heavy rain, it was the more felt. 
We were, however, all snug, and in smooth water, 
in consequence of the Mistral* blowing right off 
the shore. We must have been 20 or 25 miles 
from Spezia, when the storm burst upon us. 

I should think few pleasure-boats could have 
lived in such weather, especially in the bay of 
Spezia, where it was impossible to run before the 

* The old way of spelling Mistral was Maestral, or pre- 
vailing wind — Vento Maestro. 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 77 

wind, the reefs stretching a long way out, and 
the surf rising very high all along the coast. After 
beating all night and the best part of the next 
day, we at length got into harbour. x\t the 
Hotel de l'Europe there was a rumour that two 
Englishmen had been lost near Lerici ; but though 
I knew my friends were living in the vicinity of 
that place, it never entered my mind that they 
were the individuals, and proceeded on my journey 
to Switzerland. Some days after my arrival at 
Geneva, however, I heard from Byron and Mrs. 
Shelley the melancholy news, and immediately 
recrossed the Alps. At Sarzana, the people of the 
place told me that the bodies of my friends had 
been washed on shore. On the evening of the 
same day I arrived at Pisa. I have already, as 
taken from the mouth of Mr. Trelawney, given a 
description of the funeral ceremony, and my finding 
Byron in a high fever, on his return from the sad 
obsequies, and have nothing to add to that account. 



78 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

I believe that Byron felt severely the loss of 
Shelley — though, it must be confessed, his remarks 
at the pyre, and swimming off to his yacht, little 
prove it. Don Juan like, he was a strange com- 
pound of meanness and generosity, of the pathetic 
and ludicrous, the grave and the gay, the sublime 
and the ridiculous.* An instance of this was not 
wanting during the first days of my visit. In the 
burning of Shelley, there was a portion of his body 
that would not consume. It was supposed to be 
his heart. Mr. Leigh Hunt carefully preserved 
and took with him the relic to the Lanfranchi. 
This Mrs. Shelley of course claimed. But her 

* There is an anecdote of Byron, which justice requires 
should not be passed over. At one of the dinners he gave at 
Pisa, (before dinner, I should say,) he proposed to Shelley a 
bet of 1000 1, on the longevity of Sir Timothy Shelley and Lady 
Noel. This bet Shelley accepted ; and many weeks had not 
transpired before Lady Byron's mother died ; but Byron never 
mentioned, or offered to pay the debt. Qucere, if the Countess 
had survived the Baronet,- whether Byron would not have 
claimed, and Shelley paid the 1000 £. 1 Both may be answered 
in the affirmative. 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 79 

right was contested for some time on the part of 
Mr. Hunt, who contended that his friendship 
surpassed her love. 

Byron compared this amiable dispute to that be- 
tween Ajax and Ulysses, for the arms of Achilles, 
and said, "What does Hunt want with it? He'll 
only put it in a glass case and make sonnets on 
it." Byron had heard also that Mrs. Williams 
meant to preserve her husband's ashes in an urn. 
His remark was, "Why, she'll make tea in it one 
of these days." 

These grim jokes were certainly ill-timed, but 
are in character with the writer of the shipwreck 
in Don Juan. 

During several evenings we passed together, it 
was a melancholy satisfaction to talk over all the 
particulars of the wreck. It would seem that 
Shelley had been insensible of the danger, as well 
as Williams, for the boat was seen to have gone 
down with every stitch of sail set, as proved after- 



80 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

wards, when it was found. Williams was a good 
swimmer, and had no douht made strong efforts 
for his life, having heen washed on the beach 
partly undressed ; but Shelley had his hand locked 
in his waistcoat, where he had in his haste thrust 
a volume of Keats's poems, showing that he had 
been reading to the last moment, and had not 
made the slightest struggle to save himself. We 
both agreed that he wished to die young, though 
if years are to be measured by events, he had 
lived, as he used to say, to a hundred. Shelley's 
writings are prophetic of his destiny. He singularly 
remarks : " The life of a man of talent, who should 
die in his thirtieth year, is, with regard to his own 
feelings, longer than that of a miserable, priest- 
ridden slave, who dreams out a century of dulness. 
The one has perpetually cultivated his mental 
faculties — has rendered himself master of his 
thoughts — can abstract and generalize amid the 
lethargy of every-day business ; — the other can 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 81 

slumber over the brightest moments of his being, 
and is unable to remember the happiest hour of 
his life. Perhaps the perishing ephemeron enjoys 
a longer life than the tortoise." Byron did ample 
justice to his talents and virtues, and we passed 
in review the strange occurrences of his life, and 
among the rest canvassed fully his Naples Ro- 
mance. Byron thought, as Maddocks had done 
in the Welch affair, that the whole was the effect 
of an overwrought imagination. I am of a very 
different opinion — for, however visionary Shelley 
might be in his poetical theories, in the concerns 
of life he always showed a particular sagacity and 
rationality; for it was a curious anomaly in his 
character, that, although he was extremely negli- 
gent as to his own, there was no one to whom a 
friend could better intrust his affairs, no one who 
displayed more judgment, prudence, and caution 
in their arrangement. This, Byron, who was not 
a man of business, knew, and latterly, seldom 



82 MEMOIR OF SHELLEW 

acted without having recourse to Shelley — whose 
advice he generally adopted. We had much dis- 
cussion about the c Liberal' then preparing. The 
influence Shelley had over Byron, was proved in 
nothing more than his being persuaded to join in 
that review, the first idea of which was suggested 
by Shelley for the benefit of Mr. Hunt. Byron, 
by Shelley's death, found himself in a cleft stick 
— was in honour bound, though " a contre cceur" 
to lend his name to a periodical the fate of which 
he foresaw. Had Shelley lived, it probably might 
have been different ; though the tide of cant was 
then running so strong, that the addition of even 
his talent would hardly have availed to stem it. 
Byron's friends were all hostile to the under- 
taking : he himself never entered heartily into it, 
and was not sorry to see it fail. He only wrote, 
I believe, one prose article, that on ' My Grand- 
mother's Review, the British,' and I am surprised 
that Messrs. Moore and Murray, who have scraped 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 83 

together every scrap, raked up the rags and 
tatters and cinders of Byron, should have for- 
gotten to give a place, in their castrated quartos,* 

* I am at no loss to account for the inveteracy with which 
I was assailed by the press, through the influence of the 
all-mighty of bibliopolists, and the persevering attempts that 
were for a time but too successfully exerted, to cast doubts 
on the authenticity of Byron's ' Conversations.' Much credit 
is due to the publisher for this very ingenious, and to him 
useful policy. The fact is, that Messrs. Moore, Murray, and 
Hobhouse looked upon Lord Byron as an heir-loom, as their 
private property ; and were highly indignant that any one 
should presume to know anything about their noble friend. 
Considering how fond Lord Byron was of mystifying, it is most 
singular that almost every anecdote contained in my Sketch 
of his Life, should have been subsequently confirmed by his 
letters or autobiography ; but I must consider it a remarkable 
piece of effrontery that Mr. Moore should treat me as so far 
dead in the world of letters, as, without any acknowledg- 
ment, apology, or citation of the ' Conversations/ to strengthen 
his diluted volumes with the most spiritual part of mine. 
The communication from Goethe to me, he has taken upon 
himself to extract, only changing a few words of my translation, 
and omitting that of the Sonnet addressed by that much- 
lamented poet to Lord Byron. The beautiful lines to the 
Countess Guiccioli, and the Irish Avatara, and many of the 
Epigrams, he has assumed to himself the same privilege of 
adding to this edition ; and to the seventh volume, containing 
the Juvenile Poems, has appended, with the signature E., (as 

g2 



84 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

to one of the most humorous of their noble cor- 
respondent's jeux d esprit. 

Byron, the most superstitious of beings, related 
also the following story of Shelley, which I after- 
wards heard confirmed. Shortly before his fatal 
voyage to Leghorn, the inhabitants of the country 
house at San Lorenzo were alarmed, at midnight, 
by piercing shrieks. They rushed out of their 
bed-rooms. Mrs. Shelley, who had miscarried a 
few days before, got as far as the door and fainted. 



his own notes,) several pages of my book, prefacing them with 
" Lord Byron said— so and so." If such a gross violation of 
literary property should be passed over, adieu to copyright. 

Had I considered Mr. Moore's a real Life of Lord Byron — 
had his materials been such as to enable him to say 

Unde fit ut pateat veluti descripta tabella 

Vita— 
I should have felt the less indignant at this liberty ; or, even 
had he acknowledged the source from which he had derived 
his information, should have been the less inclined to object to 
this piracy ; but, as nothing can be more imperfect, more 
garbled, more timid and time-serving and oae-sided, than the 
Memoirs so splendidly illustrated and vauntingly put forth to 
the public, I am not willing to be silent on this topic. 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 85 

The rest of the party found Shelley in the saloon 
with his eyes wide open, and gazing on vacancy, 
as though he beheld some spectre. On waking 
him, he related that he had had a vision. He 
thought that a figure wrapped in a mantle came 
to his bed-side, and beckoned to him. He got 
up and followed it, and when in the hall, the 
phantom lifted up the hood of his cloak, and 
showed the phantasm of himself— and saying, 
" Siete satisfatto" — vanished. 

Shelley had been reading a strange drama, which 
is supposed to have been written by Calderon, 
entitled, El embozado, 6 el encapotado. It is so 
scarce, that Washington Irving told me he had 
sought for it without success in several of the 
public libraries of Spain. The story is — that a kind 
of Cipriano or Faust is through life thwarted in 
all his plans for the acquisition of wealth, or 
honour, or happiness, by a masked stranger, who 
stands in his way like some Alastor or evil spirit. 



86 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

He is at length in love — the day is fixed for his 
marriage, — when the unknown contrives to sow 
dissension between him and his betrothed, and to 
break off the match. Infuriate with his wrongs, 
he breathes nothing but revenge, but all his at- 
tempts to discover his mysterious foe prove abor- 
tive : at length his persecutor appears of his own 
accord. When about to fight, the Embozado un- 
masks, and discovers the phantasm of himself, 
saying, "Are you satisfied?" The hero of the play 
dies with horror. 

This play had worked strongly on Shelley's ima- 
gination, and accounts for the awful scene at San 
Lorenzo. 

On the 22nd of August, I took my last leave of 
Byron, to return to Geneva. I performed this 
journey in a caratella, with relays of horses, a 
mode of conveyance which Matthews, the Invalid, 
had reason for recommending, for it enabled me 
to make much more progress than I could have 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 87 

done post. I shall not enter into my feelings 
during this mournful pilgrimage to the sites of 
my friends' funeral pyres, easily discoverable by 
their ashes. I had another duty to perform, to 
visit the country house, where they had passed their 
Villegiatura. 

From Sarzana to Lerici, there is only a cross 
(and that a narrow) carriage road. After a some- 
what difficult ascent of three miles, the caleche 
set me down at a bye foot-path, which conducts 
to San Lorenzo. The sky was perfectly cloudless, 
and not a breath of air relieved the intense heat 
of an Italian August sun. The day had been 
unusually oppressive, and there was a mistiness in 
the atmosphere, or rather a glow which softened 
down the distances into those mellow tints in which 
Claude delighted to bathe his landscapes. I was 
little in a mood to enjoy the beauties which in- 
creased every moment during this walk. I followed 
mechanically a pathway overhung with trellised 



88 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

vines, and bordered with olive trees, contrasted 
here and there with the massy broad dark foliage 
of the fig tree. For a mile or two I continued to 
ascend, till on a sudden a picture burst on my 
view, that no pen could describe. Before me was 
the broad expanse of the Mediterranean, studded 
with islands and a few fishing boats, with their 
lattine sail?, the sun's broad disk just dipping in 
the waves ; thick groves of fruit trees, interspersed 
with cottages and villas sloped down to the shores 
of the gulph of Spezia : and safely land-locked, a 
little to the left, Lerici, with its white fiat-roofed 
houses almost in the sea, stood in the centre, and 
followed the curve of this bay; the two promon- 
tories projecting from which were surmounted with 
castles for the protection of the coast, and the 
enforcing of the quarantine laws. The descent 
now became rapid and broken, and, deeply worn 
into the rock, only offered occasional glimpses of 
the sea, the two islets in front, and the varied 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 89 

coast of Porto Venere to the right. I now came 
in sight of San Lorenzo, a village, or rather a 
miserable collection of windowless black huts, 
piled one above the other, inclosed within barren 
rocks that overhang and encircle it. The place is 
inhabited solely by fishermen and their families, 
on the female part of whom devolves (as is com- 
mon in Italy) the principal labour, However 
ungraceful in itself, the peasantry of this part of 
Italy have some peculiarity of costume ; but the 
women of San Lorenzo are in a savage state of 
nature — perfect Ichthyophagi ; their long coal- 
black hair trails in greasy strings, unwashed and 
uncombed, over their faces, and some of these 
fiendish-looking creatures had not even fastened 
it in a knot behind the head, but suffered it to 
hang half way down their backs. They had 
neither shoes nor stockings, and the rags which 
scarcely hid their deformity, were strongly im- 
pregnated with the effluvia of the fish they carried 



§0 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

on their bare heads to the neighbouring markets. 
Their children were just such meagre yellow imps 
as, from such mothers, and filth, and poverty of 
food, might be supposed. The men I did not see. 

Between this village and Lerici, but nearer to 
the former, was pointed out to me the solitary villa 
or palazzo, as it was called, which was about to 
waken in me so many bitter recollections. It is 
built immediately upon the shore, and consists 
of one story ; — the ground floor, when the Libeccio 
set strongly in, must have been washed by the 
waves. 

A deaf unfeeling old wretch, a woman who 
had the care of the house, and had witnessed all 
the desolation of which it had been the scene, with 
a savage unconcern and much garrulity, -gave a 
dry narrative of the story as she led me through 
the apartment. 

Below was a large unpaved sort of entrance 
hall, without doors or windows, where lay the 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 91 

small flat-bottomed boat or skiff, much shattered, 
of which I have already spoken. It was the same 
my poor friends had on the Serchio. Against the 
wall, and scattered about the floor, were oars, and 
fragments of spars and masts, some of which had 
been cast on shore from the wreck : they told too 
well the tale of woe. 

A dark and somewhat perpendicular staircase 
now led us to the only floor that remained. It 
reminded me somewhat in its arrangement of an 
Indian Bungalow : the walls white-washed — the 
rooms, now without furniture, consisted of a saloon 
with eight doors, and four chambers at the four 
corners : this, with the exception of a terrace in. 
front, was the whole house. This verandah, which 
ran the whole length of the villa, was of consider- 
able width, and the view from it, of a magical 
and supernatural beauty. 

There was now a calm desolation in the un- 
rippled marble of the sea, that reminded me, in its 



92 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

contrast, of the days and nights of tempest and 
horror which Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Shelley 
experienced, balanced between hope and fear for 
the fate of their devoted husbands — fancying now 
that every sail would bring them to their homes, 
and now, that, in the roaring of every wave, they 
could discover their drowning cries. I could pic- 
ture to myself the ghastly smile with which 
Trelawney related the finding of their corpses — 
the torpor and unconsciousness of Mrs. Williams, 
the sublime firmness of Mrs. Shelley, contrasted 
with her frame, worn out with sickness — their 
children, too young to be sensible of their loss, 
clasped in their despairing and widowed mothers' 
arms. All this rushed upon my imagination, and, 
insensible to the heat or fatigue of the ascent, 
I found myself, scarcely knowing how, where 
my caleche was waiting for me ; — and it was 
midnight, and after a twenty-two hours' jour- 
ney, more harassing in mind and body than I 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 93 

had ever experienced, that I reached the inn at 
Spezia. 

Shelley though an outcast from his family, 
the continual object of the persecution of the 
press, and a mark for the calumny and detraction 
of the world, imbibed none of the gloom and 
misanthropy common to little minds : on the 
contrary, we can trace in his works no anger 
or dissatisfaction with the world — none of the 
fret or fever of disappointed ambition : every line 
he wrote breathes a spirit of benevolence, a love 
for the whole creation, animate and inanimate. 
Almost any but a Promethean spirit would have 
sunk under the weight of his misfortunes and 
injuries, and that past events should occasionally 
cast their shadows over him, was natural; but 
nothing could long ruffle the azure and calm 
depths of his soul. 

Shelley had at command the same weapons 
which Byron used : but he disdained the arm of 



94 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

satire, and treated his critics with a nohle scorn ; 
he says to one of them — 

The grass may grow in wintry weather 
As soon as hate in me. 

Byron had more of the cynicism of Apemantus 
than the real sense of injury that drove Tim on 
into misanthropy. This is perceptible in all his 
writings — that Shelley could wield a lash of bronze 
for others, he proved in Adonais, and not except- 
ing even the strongest lines of our English Juvenal, 
Churchill, perhaps the stanzas on Keats 's Re- 
viewer cut nearer to the bone than any in our 
language. Among the few satirical poems he 
wrote, was one on the Court of Chancery, on 
being robbed of his children; but, great as his 
wrongs were, even this he never published, though 
it should have found a place among his posthumous 
works. This satire was an abstraction, but of awful 
power. 

His longest satirical work was a comic drama 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 95 

in imitation of Aristophanes, entitled, ' (Edipus 
Tyrannus ; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant.' It was 
printed somewhere in the City, and suppressed on 
the day of publication by the desire of the then 
Lord Mayor, who was acquainted with a friend 
of Shelley's, who had superintended the press. 
Many passages in this drama are parodied from 
Sophocles, and the choruses are truly Aristophanic. 
The Queen is there designated by Pasiphae, and, 
like Io, persecuted by a swarm of gad-flies, mean- 
ing her spies and informers. The chorus, which 
traces her wanderings over the world, is very 
humorous, and, in parts, full of poetry, and begins 

thus : — 

With a Ha, and a Hum, 
We come ! we come ! 
.> From the ends of the earth — 

In some of the scenes, the swinish multitude are 
introduced before the monarch. But I have alto- 
gether forgotten the plot. 

Yet, though Shelley despised the sort of criti- 



96 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

cism with which he was all his life assailed, he 
was not insensible to the injustice of the world. 
But what could he expect from the reviewers, after 
telling them almost in the outset of his career 
that the system of reviewing was incompatible 
with poetry, and sprung up in that torpid interval 
when poetry was not ; — that Longinus and Homer 
could never have existed together, &c. — was it not 
natural that he should be attacked? Yet, writing 
with the hell of reviews before his eyes, nothing 
could ever induce him to throw a bone to the 
Cerberuses — to change one tittle or iota, in order 
to deprecate their animosity. Nor was it vanity 
or longing after fame, the common incentives of 
authors, which made him continue to publish. 
However visionary might be Shelley's theories of 
reform, they sprung from a mind in which selfish- 
ness never entered — a mind ardently devoted to 
what he considered the vital interests of humanity. 
I look upon most of his poems to be a comment 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 



97 



on the Phaedo and Republic of Plato, and that 
they have a tendency to promote liberty, and with 
it that greatest and best of truths, the immortality 
of the soul. The sincerity of his opinions, how- 
ever erroneous, was proved by the willingness 
with which he submitted to obloquy and reproach, 
in order to inculcate them. Shelley attributed 
the vice and misery of mankind — the degradation 
of the many for the benefit of the few — to an 
unnatural state of society, — to a general misgovern- 
ment in its rulers, — to the superstition and bigotry 
of a mercenary and insincere priesthood. With 
a poet's eye he foresaw a millennium — the per- 
fectability of the human race, when man would be 
happy, free, high, and majestical. 

Pure and moral himself, loving virtue for her 
own sake, and not from fear, he thought no other 
ties were necessary than the restraints imposed 
by a consciousness of right and wrong implanted 
in our natures, and could not see that in the pre- 

H 



98 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

sent state of the world, and in the default of 
education, such a system was fallacious. 

His tenets, therefore, should have heen looked 
at as those of Owen of Lanark are with us, or 
those of St. -Simon in France, as the aspirations 
of the philanthropist ; and the critic might have 
said with Maddalo — 

You talk Utopias, 

instead of calumniating the man, and attributing 
to his speculations the desire of corrupting youth, 
which could be as little said of him as it was 
untrue of Socrates. Besides, it should have been 
considered that works so abstruse, so subtle, so 
profound and metaphysical, are far beyond the 
capacities of the many, and can only be thoroughly 
comprehended by those who have made the 
Platonic philosophy the study of their lives. Even 
the Quarterly reviewers, in 1810, confessed that 
there was no danger in his writings. 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 99 

Shelley lived in a world of his own, and, be- 
lieving with Berkley only in the existence of mind, 
it was with an effort to himself that he descended 
to matter and the realities of life ; — hence, he 
used to say, that ' The Cenci' was a heavy task, 
and produced with infinite labour. Yet he proved 
in that tragedy no less an acquaintance with the 
workings of the human mind than he had done 
in displaying the secret springs of nature. He 
laboured at his ' Charles I. ' for months, and yet 
made little progress, whilst ' The Revolt of Islam' 
only occupied six months, and the ' Prometheus 
Unbound' fewer weeks. 

It was said of Heraclitus, by Socrates, that 
where he understood his works he found them 
magnificent, and where he did not, he supposed 
them to be equally so. Thus, the subtilty of 
Shelley's poetry escapes from common intellects 
— the brilliancy of his ideas, the prodigality of 
his imagination, is lost on common minds. His 
h2 



100 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 



talents were developed by an unwearied and un- 
ceasing cultivation. Poetry was not the amuse- 
ment, it was the serious occupation of his life — 
the object of his waking and dreaming thoughts. 
He exercised the severest self-criticism on every 
thing he wrote, and his MSS., like that of Tasso 
at Ferrara, are scarcely decipherable. It has been 
supposed also, that Byron improvised his poems. 
This is a great mistake, and I am told, that in 
the proofs sent him, he made what the painters 
call innumerable " Pentimentos." 

Shelley, as a poet, stands alone. He is to be 
tried by the test of no other writer. Like Byron, 
he belongs to no school. The world now begins 
to do him justice, and assign him the place he 
deserves — a niche by the side of his friend. Byron 
could set bounds to his imagination, control it at 
will. Shelley was carried away by his. Byron 
shuddered at the name of Swift, and was always, 
but without cause, terrified at the idea of ending 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 101 

life in madness or idiotism. Insanity hung as by 
a hair suspended over the head of Shelley. 

The Greeks were right about Trophonius's Cave. 
No man was ever a great poet who had not, as 
Shakspeare says, a fine frenzy. Almost all Shel- 
ley's and Byron's finest things were written under 
the effects of a temporary derangement. Perhaps 
few will agree with me in thinking Shelley the 
second master spirit of the age. His creations 
remind me of the ideal beauty of some of Ra- 
phael's Madonnas; — Byron's, of Titian's Venuses. 
Shelley's figures possess all the classical truth that 
distinguished Nicholas Poussin's, whilst his land- 
scapes combine Martin's wild imaginations with 
Turner's gorgeous sunsets filled with deepening 
gold. Byron could be a Salvator or a Claude. 
Both, like Guido, could give to every subject 
they touched a portion of their own elastic minds 
— convert everything into beauty. Neither Byron 
nor Shelley would have been the poets they were, 



102 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

but for a certain poetical education. They both 
drank their inspiration from true and pure sources 
— from all the wild and the wonderful and the 
beautiful of nature. The memory of Switzerland 
was ineffaceable in both. In his books Shelley 
used to scrawl pines and alpine summit raised 
upon alpine summit, only to be scaled by the 
Oceanides, with some spectral being stalking from 
peak to peak. 

It was the imagination directed the pen, and 
he was himself unconscious of what he was 
tracing. It was said of De Lamartine and De- 
lavigne, that if one could have swallowed the other, 
they would have made the greatest (I do not mean 
in size) of French Poets. So with Shelley and 
Byron: each wanted what the other possessed, 
to have made a paragon. 

It is to be lamented that Shelley did not live 
to complete his 'Triumph of Life/ composed in 
the fatal gulph of Spezia, or in the caverns that 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 103 

indent that romantic coast. It is unhappily a 
fragment, and, in its present arrangement, very 
obscure. He has proved that, in his hands at 
least, ' Terza Rima' is well adapted to our lan- 
guage. I made a singular discovery some time ago 
in reading a favourite author of mine, Cardan — 
that this vision of Shelley's, by a strange coinci- 
dence (for I am convinced he never saw the 
work), should have been nearly the same as Car- 
dan's, as will be seen by the following extracts: — 

Methinks I sate beside a public way, 

And a great stream 
Of people there were hurrying to and fro, 
All hastening onward, but none seemed to know 
Whither : 
Old age and youth, manhood and infancy, 

With steps towards the tomb. 

Cardan, in his chaste Latinity, says — 
" Illuscente Aurora, visus sum toto humano 
genere, maximaque turba mulierum, non solum 
ac virorum sed puerorum atque infantium, juxta 



104 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

radicem montis qui mihi a dextera erat, currere. 
Cum, admiratione captus, unum a turba interro- 
garem, quonam omnes tarn prsecipiti cursu ten- 
deremus ; Ad mortem, respondit." 

It is to be lamented that no bust or portrait 
exists of Shelley, though the infinite versatility 
and play of his features would have baffled either 
sculpture or painting. His frame was a mere tene- 
ment for spirit, and in every gesture and lineament 
showed that intellectual beauty which animated 
him. There was in him a spirit which seemed to 
defy time, and suffering, and misfortune. He was 
twenty-nine when he died, but he might have been 
taken for nineteen. His features were small; the 
upper part not strictly regular. The lower had 
a Grecian contour. He did not look so tall as 
he was, his shoulders being a little bent by study 
and ill health. Like Socrates, he united the 
gentleness of the lamb with the wisdom of the 
serpent — the playfulness of the boy with the pro- 



MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 105 

foundness of the philosopher. In argument he 
was irresistible, always calm and unruffled; and 
in eloquence surpassed all men I have ever con- 
versed with. Byron was so sensible of his in- 
ability to cope with him, that he always avoided 
coming to any trial of their strength; for Shelley 
was what Byron could not be, a close, logical and 
subtle reasoner, much of which he owed to Plato, 
whose writings he used to call the model of a 
prose style. 

He was not likely to have lived long. His 
health had been impaired by what he had under- 
gone, and by the immoderate use he at one time 
made of laudanum. He was, besides, narrow- 
chested, and subject to a complaint which, from 
day to day, might have cut him off. Its tortures 
were excruciating, but, during his worst spasms, 
I never saw him peevish or out of humour — 
indeed, as an Italian said to me, he was veramente 
un angelo. 



106 MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. 

But thou art fled, 
Like some fair exhalation, — 
The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful, 
The child of grace and genius : 
Thou canst no longer know or love the shapes 
Of this phantasmal scene, who have to thee 
Been purest ministers ; who are, alas ! 
Now thou art not. 

These affecting lines would have furnished his 
most appropriate epitaph. I have never been 
able to read them without applying them to Shel- 
ley, or his tribute to the memory of Keats, with- 
out, under the name of Adonais, impersonating 
the companion of my youth. There was, unhappily, 
too much similarity in the destinies of Keats and 
Shelley: both were victims to persecution — both 
were marked out for the envenomed shafts of in- 
vidious critics — and both now sleep together in a 
foreign land. Peace to their manes ! 



POEMS AND PAPERS 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 



INVOCATION TO MISERY. 



Come, be happy !— sit by me, 
Shadow-vested Misery : 
Coy, unwilling, silent bride, 
Mourning in thy robe of pride, 
Desolation — deified ! 



Come, be happy ! — sit near me : 
Sad as I may seem to thee, 
I am happier far than thou, 
Lady, whose imperial brow 
Is endiademed with woe. 



110 INVOCATION TO MISERY. 

Misery! we have known each other, 
Like a sister and a brother 
Living in the same lone home, 
Many years — we must live some 
Years and ages yet to come. 



'Tis an evil lot, and yet 
Let us make the most of -it ; 
If love lives when pleasure dies, 
We will love, till in our eyes 
This heart's Hell seem Paradise. 



Come, be happy ! — lie thee down 
On the fresh grass newly mown, 
Where the Grasshopper doth sing 
Merrily — one joyous thing 
In a world of sorrowing ! 



INVOCATION TO MISERY. HI 

There our tent shall be the willow, 
And thine arm shall be my pillow ; 
Sounds and odours sorrowful 
Because they once were sweet, shall lull 
Us to slumber, deep and dull. 



Ha ! thy frozen pulses flutter 
With a love thou darest not utter. 

Thou art murmuring, thou art weeping, 
Whilst my burning bosom 's leaping. 



Kiss me ; — oh ! thy lips are cold : 
Round my neck thine arms enfold— - 
They are soft, but chill and dead ; 
And thy tears upon my head 
Burn like points of frozen lead. 



112 INVOCATION TO MISERY. 

Hasten to the bridal bed — 
Underneath the grave 'tis spread : 
In darkness may our love be hid, 
Oblivion be our coverlid — 
We may rest, and none forbid. 



Clasp me till our hearts be grown 
Like two lovers into one ; 
Till this dreadful transport may 
Like a vapour fade away, 
In the sleep that lasts alway. 



We may dream, in that long sleep, 
That we are not those who weep ; 
E'en as Pleasure dreams of thee, 
Life-deserting Misery, 
Thou mayst dream of her with me. 



INVOCATION TO MISERY. 113 

Let us laugh, and make our mirth, 
At the shadows of the earth, 
As dogs bay the moonlight clouds, 
That, like spectres wrapt in shrouds, 
Pass o'er night in multitudes. 



All the wide world beside us 
Are like multitudinous 
Shadows shifting from a scene — 
What but mockery may they mean ? 
Where am I ? — Where thou hast been, 



[ 114] 



AN ARIETTE FOR MUSIC. 

TO A LADY SINGING TO HER ACCOMPANIMENT ON 
THE GUITAR. 

As the moon's soft splendour 
O'er the faint cold starlight of heaven 
Is thrown, 
So thy voice most tender 
To the strings without soul has given 
Its own. 

The stars will awaken, 
Though the moon sleep a full hour later 
To-night : 
No leaf will be shaken 
Whilst the dews of thy melody scatter 
Delight. 



ARIETTE FOR MUSIC. 115 

Though the sound overpowers, 
Sing again, with thy sweet voice revealing 
A tone 
Of some world far from ours, 
Where music and moonlight and feeling 
Are one. 

[Note. — This Ariette has been very beautifully set to music 
by Mr. Henry Lincoln.] 



LINES 



WRITTEN DURING THE CASTLEREAGH 
ADMINISTRATION. 

Corpses are cold in the tomb ; 
Stones on the pavement are dumb ; 
Abortions are dead in the womb, — 
And their mothers look pale, like the white shore 
Of Albion, free no more ! 



116 WRITTEN DURING THE 

Her sons are as stones in the way ; 

They are masses of senseless clay ; 

They are trodden, and move not away ;- 

The abortion with which she travaileth, 

Is Liberty, smitten to death. 



Then trample and dance, thou Oppressor ! 
For thy victim is no redresser ; 
Thou art sole lord and possessor 
Of her corpses, and clods, and abortions — they pave 
Thy path to the grave. 



Hearest thou the festal din 
Of Death, and Destruction, and Sin, 
And Wealth crying HavocJc ! within ? 
5 Tis the Bacchanal triumph which makes truth 
dumb — 
Thine Epithalamium ! 



CASTLEREAGH ADMmiSTRATION. 117 

Aye, marry thy ghastly wife ! 
Let Fear, and Disgust, and Strife, 
Spread thy couch in the chamber of Life : 
Marry Ruin, thou Tyrant ! and God be thy guide 
To the bed of thy bride J 



WITH A GUITAR. 

The artist who this idol wrought, 
To echo all harmonious thought, 
Felled a tree, while on the steep 
The winds were in their winter sleep, 
Rocked in that repose divine 
On the wind-swept Apennine ; 
And dreaming some of Autumn past, 
And some of Spring approaching fast, 
And some of April buds and showers, 
And some of songs in July bowers, 



118 WITH A GUITAR. 

And all of love ; and so this tree, — 

O that such our death may be ! — 

Died in sleep, and felt no pain, 

To live in happier form again ; 

From which, beneath Heaven's fairest star, 

The artist wrought that loved Guitar, 

And taught it justly to reply, 

To all who question skilfully, 

In language gentle as its own, 

Whispering in enamoured tone 

Sweet oracles of woods and dells, 

And summer winds in sylvan cells ; 

For it had learnt all harmonies 

Of the plains and of the skies, 

Of the forests and the mountains, 

And the many-voiced fountains ; 

The clearest echoes of the hills, 

The softest notes of falling rills, 

The melodies of birds and bees, 

The murmuring of summer seas, 



WITH A GUITAR. 119 

And pattering rain, and breathing dew, 
And airs of evening ; and it knew 
That seldom-heard mysterious sound, 
Which, driven in its diurnal round, 
As it floats through boundless day, 
Our world enkindles on its way — 
All this it knows, but will not tell 
To those who cannot question well 
The spirit that inhabits it. 
It talks according to the wit 
Of its companions ; and no more 
Is heard than has been felt before, 
By those who tempt it to betray 
These secrets of an elder day : 
But sweetly as its answers will 
Flatter hands of perfect skill, 
It keeps its highest, holiest tone, 
For our beloved friend alone. 



[ 120 ] 



THE MAGNETIC LADY TO HER 
PATIENT.* 

Sleep on ! sleep on! forget thy pain : 

My hand is on thy brow, 
My spirit on thy brain ; 
My pity on thy heart, poor friend ; 

And from my fingers flow 
The powers of life, and like a sign, 

Seal thee from thine hour of woe ; 
And brood on thee, but may not blend 
With thine. 

* See the Memoir, page 65, 



MAGNETIC LADY TO HER PATIENT. 121 

Sleep on ! sleep on ! I love thee not ; 

But when I think that he 
Who made and makes my lot 
As full of flowers as thine of weeds, 

Might have been lost like thee ; 
And that a hand which was not mine, 

Might then have chased his agony 
As I another's — my heart bleeds 
For thine. 

Sleep, sleep, and with the slumber of 

The dead and the unborn : 
Forget thy life and woe; 
Forget that thou must wake for ever ; 

Forget the world's dull scorn ; 
Forget lost health, and the divine 

Feelings that die in youth's brief morn ; 
And forget me, for I can never 
Be thine. 



122 MAGNETIC LADY TO HER PATIENT. 

Like a cloud big with a May shower, 

My soul weeps healing rain, 
On thee, thou withered flower ; 
It breathes mute music on thy sleep ; 

Its odour calms thy brain ! 
Its light within thy gloomy breast 

Speaks like a second youth again. 
By mine thy being is to its deep 
Possest. 

The spell is done. How feel you now ? 

Better — Quite well, replied 
The sleeper. — What would do 
You good when suffering and awake ? 

What cure your head and side ? — 
'T would kill me what would cure my pain ; 

And as I must on earth abide 
Awhile, yet tempt me not to break 
My chain. 



123 



TO THE QUEEN OF MY HEART. 

Shall we roam, my love, 
To the twilight grove, 

When the moon is rising bright ; 
Oh, I '11 whisper there, 
In the cool night-air, 

What I dare not in broad day-light ! 

I '11 tell thee a part 

Of the thoughts that start 

To being when thou art nigh j 
And thy beauty, more bright 
Than the stars' soft light, 

Shall seem as a weft from the sky. 



124 TO THE QUEEN 

When the pale moonbeam 
On tower and stream 

Sheds a flood of silver sheen, 
How I love to gaze 
As the cold ray strays 

O'er thy face, my heart's throned queen ! 

Wilt thou roam with me 
To the restless sea, 

And linger upon the steep, 
And list to the flow 
Of the waves below 

How they toss and roar and leap? 

Those boiling waves 
And the storm that raves 

At night o'er their foaming crest, 
Resemble the strife 
That, from earliest life, 

The passions have waged in my breast. 



OF MY HEART. 125 

Oh, come then and rove 
To the sea or the grove 

When the moon is rising bright, 
And I '11 whisper there 
In the cool night-air 

What I dare not in broad day-light. 



SIMILES. 

As from an ancestral oak 

Two empty ravens sound their clarion, 
Yell by yell, and croak by croak, 
When they scent the noonday smoke 

Of fresh human carrion : — 

As two gibbering night birds flit 
From their bowers of deadly hue, 

Through the night to frighten it, 

When the morn is in a fit, 

And the stars are none, or few : — 



126 SIMILES. 

As a shark and dog-fish wait 

Under an Atlantic isle, 
For the negro-ship, whose freight . 
Is the theme of their debate, 

Wrinkling their red gills the while — 

Are ye, two vultures sick for battle, 

Two scorpions under one wet stone, 
Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, 
Two crows perched on the murrained cattle, 
Two vipers tangled into one. 



[ 127 ] 



THE COLISEUM. 

A FRAGMENT.* 

At the hour of noon, on the feast of the Pass- 
over, an old man, accompanied by a girl, appa- 
rently his daughter, entered the Coliseum at Rome. 
They immediately passed through the arena, and, 
seeking a solitary chasm among the arches of the 
southern part of the ruin, selected a fallen column 
for their seat, and, clasping each other's hands, sate 
in silent contemplation of the scene. But the 
eyes of the girl were fixed upon her father's 
lips : his countenance, sublime and sweet, but mo- 
tionless as some Praxitelian image of the greatest 
of poets, filled the air with smiles reflected from 
external forms. 

It was the great feast of the Resurrection, and 
the whole native population, together with the 
foreigners, who flock from all parts of the earth to 
contemplate its celebration, were assembled round 

* This is the fragment referred to in the Memoir, p. 51. 



128 THE COLISEUM. 

the Vatican. The most awful religion in the world 
went forth surrounded with the emblazonry of 
mortal greatness, and mankind had assembled to 
wonder at and worship the creation of its own 
power. No stranger was to be met with in the 
avenues that led to the Coliseum. Accident had 
conducted the father and daughter to the spot 
immediately on their arrival. 

A figure, only visible at Rome in night or soli- 
tude, and then only to be seen amid the desolated 
temples of the Forum, or gliding among the gal- 
leries of the Coliseum, or the ruined arches of 
the Baths of Caracalla, crossed their path. 

His form, that, though emaciated, displayed the 
elementary outline of exquisite grace, was enveloped 
in an ancient chlamys, which half concealed his 
face. It was a face, once seen, never to be for- 
gotten. The lips and the moulding of the chin 
resembled the eager and impassioned tenderness 
of the shapes of Antinous ; but, instead of the 
effeminate sullenness of the eye, and the narrow 
smoothness of the forehead, shone an expression of 
profound and piercing thought. His brow was 
clear and open, and his eyes deep, and like two 
wells of crystalline water which reflect the all- 



THE COLISEUM. 129 

beholding heavens. Over all was spread a timid 
expression of diffidence and retirement, which in- 
termingled strangely with the abstract and fearless 
character which predominated in his form and 
gestures.f He avoided, in an extraordinary de- 
gree, what is called society, but was occasionally 
seen to converse with some accomplished foreigner, 
whose appearance might attract him in his solemn 
haunts. He spoke Italian with fluency, though 
with a peculiar but sweet accent. There was no 
circumstance connected with him that gave the 
least intimation of his country, his origin, or his 
occupations. He was for ever alone. 

Such was the figure which interrupted the con- 
templation (if they were so engaged) of the 
strangers, in the clear and exact, but unidiomatic 
phrase of their native language. 

" Strangers, you are two — behold the third in 
this great city, to whom alone the spectacle of 
these ruins is more delightful than the pageantry 
of religion." 

" I see nothing," said the old man. 



t There never was drawn a more perfect portrait of Shelley 
himself. 



130 THE COLISEUM. 

" What do you hear, then ?" 

" I listen to the sweet singing of the birds, the 
humming of the bees, which, and the sound of 
my daughter's breathing, compose me like the soft 
murmur of waters ; and this sun-warm wind is 
pleasant to me." 

" Wretched old man ! know you not that these 
are the ruins of the Coliseum?" 

" Alas, stranger !" said the girl, in a voice like 
mournful music : " speak not so, my father is 
blind." 

The stranger's eyes now suddenly filled with 
tears, and the lines of his countenance became 
relaxed. 

"Blind!" he exclaimed, in a tone of suffering 
which was more than an apology, and seated 
himself apart on a flight of shallow and mossy 
steps, which wound up among the labyrinths of 
the ruin. 

"My sweet Helen," said the old man, "you 
did not tell me that this was the Coliseum." 

"How should I tell you, dearest father, what 
I knew not ? I was on the point of inquiring the 
way to that building when we entered the circle 
of the ruins ; and until the stranger accosted us, I 



THE COLISEUM. 131 

remained silent, subdued by the greatness of what 
I saw." 

"'Tis your custom, sweetest girl, to describe 
to me the objects that give you delight; you array 
them in the soft radiance of your words; and whilst 
you speak, I only feel the infirmity which holds 
me in such dear diffidence as a blessing. Why 
have you been so long silent ?" 

u I know not. First, the wonder and the pleasure 
of the sight; then, the words of the stranger, and 
then thinking on what he said, and how he looked ; 
and now, beloved father, on your own words." 

"Well, dearest, what do you see?" 

" I see a vast circle of arches built upon arches, 
and stones like shattered crags, so vast are they, 
and walls giddily hanging — totteringly : — on walls. 
In the crevices and in the vaulted roofs, grows a 
multitude of shrubs : the wild olive, the myrtle, 
and the jasmine, and intricate brambles, and en- 
tangled weeds, and strange feathery plants like 
dishevelled hair, such as I never saw before. The 
stones are immensely massive, and they jut out 
from each other like mountain cliffs. There are 
terrible rifts in the walls and high windows, through 
which is seen the light of the blue heavens. There 



132 THE COLISEUM. 

seem to me more than a thousand arches, some 
ruined, some entire, and they are all immensely 
high and wide. Some are broken, and stand forth 
in great heaps, and the underwood is tufted in 
their crumbling fragments. Around us lie enor- 
mous collections of shattered and shapeless capitals 
and cornices, loaded with delicate sculpture." 

" It is open to the sky," said the old man. 

" We see the liquid depth of heaven above, and 
through the rifts and the windows, the flowers 
and the weeds and the grass and creeping moss, 
are nourished by the unforbidden rain. The blue 
sky is above — the wide bright blue sky ; it flows 
through the great rifts on high, and through the 
bare boughs of the marble-rooted fig-tree, and 
through the leaves and flowers of the weeds, even 
to the dark arcades beneath. I feel, I see it — 
its clear and piercing beams fill the universe and 
impregnate the joy-inspiring wind with warmth 
and light and life, and interpenetrate all things, 
even me, father. And through the highest rift, 
the noonday waning moon is hanging, as it were, 
out of the solid sky: and this shows that the 
atmosphere has the clearness which it rejoices me 
that I feel." 



THE COLISEUM. 133 

" Dearest child, what else see you ?" 

"Nothing." 

"Nothing?" 

" Only the bright, green, mossy ground inter- 
spersed with tufts of dewy clover-grass, that run 
into the interstices of the shattered arches, and 
round the isolated pinnacles of the ruins." 

" Like those lawny dells of soft short grass which 
wind among the high forests and precipices of the 
Alps of Savoy."* 

" Indeed, father, your eye has a vision more 
serene than mine." 

" And the great wrecked arches, the shattered 
masses of precipitous ruin overgrown with the 
younglings of the forest, and more like chasms 
rent by earthquakes among the mountains, than 
the vestige of what was human workmanship." 

"What are they?" 

" Things awe-inspiring and wonderful — are they 
not caverns such as the untamed elephant and 

* Shelley on visiting Meillerie, says, " Groves of pine, chesnut, 
and walnut, overshadow it ; magnificent and unbounded forests, 
to which England affords no parallel. In the midst of these 
woods are dells of lawny expanse inconceivably verdant, 
adorned with a thousand of the rarest floweFs, and odorous 
with thyme." 



134 THE COLISEUM. 

tigress might choose amid the Indian wildernesses 
where to hide their cubs — such as, were the sea to 
overflow the earth, the mighty monsters of the 
deep would change into their vast chambers V* 

" Father, your words image forth what I would 
have expressed, but could not." 

"I hear the rustling of leaves, and the sound 
of water — but it does not rain — like the faint drops 
of a fountain among woods." 

" It falls from among the heaps of ruin over 
our heads. It is, I suppose, the water collected 
in the rifts from the showers." 

" A nursling of man now abandoned by his care, 
and transformed by the enchantment of Nature 
into a likeness of her own creations, and destined 
to partake their immortality. Changed to a moun- 
tain cloven into woody dells, which overhang its 
labyrinthine glades, and shattered into toppling 
precipices, even the clouds, intercepted by its craggy 
summits, supply eternal fountains with their rain." 

" By the column on which we sit, I should judge 
that it had once been crowned with a temple or 
theatre, and that in sacred days the radiant mul- 
titude wound up its craggy path to the spectacle 
or the sacrifice." 



i 



THE AGE OF PERICLES. 135 

" It was such, Helen — What sound of wings 
is that?" 

" It is of the wild pigeons returning to their 
young. Do you not hear the murmur of those that 
are brooding in their nests?" 

" It is the language of their happiness." 



THE AGE OF PERICLES: 

WITH CRITICAL NOTICES OF THE SCULPTURE IN 
THE FLORENCE GALLERY. 

The period which intervened between the birth 
of Pericles and the death of Aristotle, is undoubt- 
edly, whether considered in itself, or with reference 
to the effects which it produced upon the subse- 
quent destinies of civilized man, the most me- 
morable in the history of the world. What was 
the combination of moral and political circum- 
stances which produced so unparalleled a progress 
during that period in literature and the arts; — 
why that progress, so rapid and so sustained, so 
soon received a check, and became retrograde, — are 
problems left to the wonder and conjecture of 



136 THE AGE OF PERICLES. 

posterity. The wrecks and fragments of those 
subtle and profound minds, like the ruins of a fine 
statue, obscurely suggest to us the grandeur and 
perfection of the whole. Then very language, — a 
type of the understanding, of which it was the 
creation and the image, — in variety, in simplicity, 
in flexibility, and in copiousness, excels every other 
language of the western world. Their sculptures 
are such as, in our perception, assume to be the 
models of ideal truth and beauty, and to which, 
no artist of modern times can produce forms in 
any degree comparable. Their paintings, according 
to Pausanias, were full of delicacy and harmony; 
and some were powerfully pathetic, so as to awaken, 
like tender music or tragic poetry, the most over- 
whelming emotions. We are accustomed to con- 
sider the painters of the sixteenth century, as those 
who have brought this art to the highest perfection, 
probably because none of the ancient pictures have 
been preserved. 

All the inventive arts maintain, as it were, a 
sympathetic connexion between each other, being 
no more than various expressions of one internal 
power, modified by different circumstances, either 
of an individual, or of society. 






THE AGE OF PERICLES. 137 

The paintings of that period would probably 
bear the same relation as is confessedly borne by 
the sculptures to all successive ones. Of their 
music we know little; but the effects which it is 
said to have produced, whether they be attributed 
to the skill of the composer, or the sensibility of his 
audience, were far more powerful than any which 
we experience from the music of our times ; and 
if, indeed, the melody of their compositions were 
more tender, and delicate, and inspiring, than the 
melodies of some modern European nations, their 
progress in this art must have been something 
wonderful, and wholly beyond conception. Their 
poetry seems to maintain a high, though not so 
disproportionate a rank, in comparison. Perhaps 
Shakspeare, from the variety and comprehension 
of his genius, is to be considered as the greatest 
individual mind, of which we have specimens re- 
maining ; — perhaps Dante created imaginations of 
greater loveliness and beauty than any that are to be 
found in the ancient literature of Greece ; — perhaps 
nothing has been discovered in the fragments of 
the Greek lyric poets equivalent to the sublime 
and chivalrous sensibility of Petrarch : — but, as a 
poet, Homer must be acknowledged to excel Shak- 



138 THE AGE OF PERICLES. 

speare in the truth and harmony, the sustained 
grandeur, and satisfying completeness of his images, 
their exact fitness to the illustration, and to that 
which they belong. Nor could Dante, deficient 
in conduct, plan, nature, variety, and temperance, 
have been brought into comparison, but for the 
fortunate isles, laden with golden fruit, which alone 
could tempt any one to embark in the misty ocean 
of his dark and extravagant fiction. 

ON THE NIOBE. 

Of all that remains to us of Greek antiquity, 
this figure is perhaps the most consummate per- 
sonification of loveliness, with regard to its coun- 
tenance, as that of the Venus of the Tribune is 
with regard to its entire form of woman. It is 
colossal : the size adds to its value ; because it 
allows to the spectator the choice of a greater 
number of points of view, and affords him a more 
analytical one, in which to catch a greater number 
of the infinite modes of expression, of which any 
form approaching ideal beauty is necessarily com- 
posed. It is the figure of a mother in the act of 
sheltering, from some divine and inevitable peril, 
the last, we may imagine, of her surviving children. 



THE AGE OF PERICLES. 139 

The little creature, terrified, as we may conceive, 
at the strange destruction of all its kindred, has 
fled to its mother, and is hiding its head in the 
folds of her robe, and casting back one arm, as in 
a passionate appeal for defence, where it never 
before could have been sought in vain. She is 
clothed in a thin tunic of delicate woof; and her 
hair is fastened on her head into a knot, probably 
by that mother whose care will never fasten it 
again. Niobe is enveloped in profuse drapery, a 
portion of which the left hand has gathered up, 
and is in the act of extending it over the child in 
the instinct of shielding her from what reason 
knows to be inevitable. The right (as the restorer 
has properly imagined,) is drawing up her daughter 
to her ; and with that instinctive gesture, and by 
its gentle pressure, is encouraging the child to be- 
lieve that it can give security. The countenance of 
Niobe is the consummation of feminine majesty and 
loveliness, beyond which the imagination scarcely 
doubts that it can conceive anything. 

That masterpiece of the poetic harmony of 
marble expresses other feelings. There is embodied 
a sense of the inevitable and rapid destiny which 
is consummating around her, as if it were already 



140 THE AGE OF PERICLES. 

over. It seems as if despair and beauty had 
combined, and produced nothing but the sublimity 
of grief. As the motions of the form expressed 
the instinctive sense of the possibility of protect- 
ing the child, and the accustomed and affectionate 
assurance that she would find an asylum within 
her arms, so reason and imagination speak in the 
countenance the certainty that no mortal defence 
is of avail. There is no terror in the countenance, 
only grief — deep, remediless grief. There is no 
anger : — of what avail is indignation against what 
is known to be omnipotent ? There is no selfish 
shrinking from personal pain — there is no panic 
at supernatural agency — there is no adverting to 
herself as herself : the calamity is mightier than to 
leave scope for such emotions. 

Everything is swallowed up in sorrow : she is 
all tears : her countenance, in assured expectation 
of the arrow piercing its last victim in her em- 
brace, is fixed on her omnipotent enemy. The 
pathetic beauty of the expression of her tender, 
and inexhaustible, and unquenchable despair, is 
beyond the effect of sculpture. As soon as the 
arrow shall pierce her last tie upon earth, the fable 
that she was turned into stone, or dissolved into 



THE AGE OF PERICLES. 141 

a fountain of tears, will be but a feeble emblem 
of the sadness of hopelessness, in which the few 
and evil years of her remaining life, we feel, must 
flow away. 

It is difficult to speak of the beauty of the 
countenance, or to make intelligible in words, from 
what such astonishing loveliness results. 

The head, resting somewhat backward upon the 
full and flowing contour of the neck, is as in the 
act of watching an event momently to arrive. 
The hair is delicately divided on the forehead, 
and a gentle beauty gleams from the broad and 
clear forehead, over which its strings are drawn. 
The face is of an oval fulness, and the features 
conceived with the daring of a sense of power. 
In this respect it resembles the careless majesty 
which Nature stamps upon the rare masterpieces 
of her creation, harmonizing them as it were from 
the harmony of the spirit . within. Yet all this 
not only consists with, but is the cause of the 
subtlest delicacy of clear and tender beauty — the 
expression at once of innocence and sublimity of 
soul — of purity and strength — of all that which 
touches the most removed and divine of the chords 
that made music in our thoughts — of that which 



i 



142 THE AGE OF PERICLES. 

shakes with astonishment even the most super- 
ficial. 

THE MINERVA. 

The head is of the highest beauty. It has a 
close helmet, from which the hair, delicately parted 
on the forehead, half escapes. The attitude gives 
entire effect to the perfect form of the neck, and 
to that full and beautiful moulding of the lower 
part of the face and mouth, which is in living 
beings the seat of the expression of a simplicity 
and integrity of nature. Her face, upraised to 
heaven, is animated with a profound, sweet, and 
impassioned melancholy, with an earnest, and 
fervid, and disinterested pleading against some 
vast and inevitable wrong. It is the joy and 
poetry of sorrow making grief beautiful, and giving 
it that nameless feeling which, from the imperfection 
of language, we call pain, but which is not all 
pain, though a feeling which makes not only its 
possessor, but the spectator of it, prefer it to what 
is called pleasure, in which all is not pleasure. It 
is difficult to think that this head, though of the 
highest ideal beauty, is the head of Minerva, al- 
though the attributes and attitude of the lower 



THE AGE OF PERICLES. 143 

part of the statue certainly suggest that idea. The 
Greeks rarely, in their representations of the cha- 
racters of their gods, — unless we call the poetic 
enthusiasm of Apollo a mortal passion, — expressed 
the disturbance of human feeling ; and here is 
deep and impassioned grief animating a divine 
countenance. It is, indeed, divine. Wisdom 
(which Minerva may be supposed to emblem,) is 
pleading earnestly with Power, — and invested with 
the expression of that grief, because it must ever 
plead so vainly. The drapery of the statue, the 
gentle beauty of the feet, and the grace of the 
attitude, are what may be seen in many other 
statues belonging to that astonishing era which 
produced it : such a countenance is seen in few. 

This statue happens to be placed on a pedestal, 
the subject of whose reliefs is in a spirit wholly 
the reverse. It was probably an altar to Bacchus 
— possibly a funeral urn. Under the festoons of 
fruits and flowers that grace the pedestal, the 
corners of which are ornamented with the sculls 
of goats, are sculptured some figures of Maenads 
under the inspiration of the god.* Nothing can 

* There is an urn in the British Museum, whose relievos 
are of the same era, and where the same subject is treated in 



144 THE AGE OF PERICLES. 

be conceived more wild and terrible than their ges- 
tures, touching, as they do, the verge of distortion, 
into which their fine limbs and lovely forms are 
thrown. There is nothing, however, that exceeds 
the possibility of nature, though it borders on its 
utmost line. 

The tremendous spirit of superstition, aided by 
drunkenness, producing something beyond insanity, 
seems to have caught them in its whirlwinds, and 
to bear them over the earth, as the rapid volutions 
of a tempest have the ever- changing trunk of a 
waterspout, or as the torrent of a mountain river 
whirls the autumnal leaves resistlessly along in its 
full eddies. The hair, loose and floating, seems 
caught in the tempest of their own tumultuous 
motion ; their heads are thrown back, leaning with 
a strange delirium upon their necks, and looking 
up to heaven, whilst they totter and stumble even 
in the energy of their tempestuous dance. 

One represents Agave with the head of Pentheus 
in one hand, and in the other a great knife; a 
second has a spear with its pine cone, which 
was the Thyrsus; another dances with mad vo- 

a way by no means inferior to that described so enthusias- 
tically by Shelley. It is in the room of the admirable Faun. 



i 



THE AGE OF PERICLES. 145 

luptuousness; the fourth is beating a kind of tam- 
bourine. 

This was indeed a monstrous superstition, even 
in Greece, where it was alone capable of combining 
ideal beauty and poetical and abstract enthusiasm 
with the wild errors from which it sprung. In 
Rome it had a more familiar, wicked, and dry 
appearance ; it was not suited to the severe and 
exact apprehensions of the Romans, and their 
strict morals were violated by it, and sustained a 
deep injury, little analogous to its effects upon the 
Greeks, who turned all things — superstition, pre- 
judice, murder, madness — to beauty. 

ON THE VENUS CALLED ANADYOMINE. 

She has just issued from the bath, and yet is 
animated with the enjoyment of it. 

She seems all soft and mild enjoyment, and the 
curved lines of her fine limbs flow into each other 
with a never-ending sinuosity of sweetness. Her 
face expresses a breathless, yet passive and inno- 
cent voluptuousness, free from aiFectation. Her 
lips, without the sublimity of lofty and impetuous 
passion, the grandeur of enthusiastic imagination 

L 



146 THE AGE OF PERICLES. 

of the Apollo of the Capitol, or the union of both, 
like the Apollo Belvidere, have the tenderness of 
arch, yet pure and affectionate desire, and the mode 
in which the ends of the mouth are drawn in, yet 
lifted or half-opened, with the smile that for ever 
circles round them, and the tremulous curve into 
which they are wrought by inextinguishable desire, 
and the tongue lying against the lower lip, as in the 
listlessness of passive joy, express love, still love. 

Her eyes seem heavy and swimming with plea- 
sure, and her small forehead fades on both sides 
into that sweet swelling and thin declension of the 
bone over the eye, in the mode which expresses 
simple and tender feelings. 

The neck is full, and panting as with the 
aspiration of delight, and flows with gentle curves 
into her perfect form. 

Her form is indeed perfect. She is half-sitting 
and half-rising from a shell, and the fullness of 
her limbs, and their complete roundness and per- 
fection, do not diminish the vital energy with 
which they seem to be animated. The position of 
the arms, which are lovely beyond imagination, is 
natural, unaffected, and easy. This, perhaps, is 
the finest personification .of Venus, the deity of 



THE AGE OF PERICLES. 147 

superficial desire, in all antique statuary. Her 
pointed and pear-like person, ever virgin, and her 
attitude modesty itself. 

A BAS-RELIEF. 

PROBABLY THE SIDES OE A SARCOPHAGUS. 

The lady is lying on a couch, supported by a 
young woman, and looking extremely exhausted; 
her dishevelled hair is floating about her shoulder, 
and she is half-covered with drapery that falls on 
the couch. 

Her tunic is exactly like a chemise, only the 
sleeves are longer, coming half way down the 
upper part of the arm. An old wrinkled woman, 
with a cloak over her head, and an enormously 
sagacious look, has a most professional appearance, 
and is taking hold of her arm gently with one 
hand, and with the other is supporting it. I 
think she is feeling her pulse. At the side of the 
couch sits a woman as in grief, holding her head 
in her hands. At the bottom of the bed is another 
matron tearing her hair, and in the act of scream- 
ing out most violently, which she seems, however, 
by the rest of her gestures, to do with the utmost 



148 THE AGE OF PERICLES. 

deliberation, as having come to the resolution, that 
it was a correct thing to do so. Behind her is a 
gossip of the most ludicrous ugliness, crying, I 
suppose, or praying, for her arms are crossed upon 
her neck. There is also a fifth setting up a wail. 
To the left of the couch a nurse is sitting on the 
ground dandling the child in her arms, and wholly 
occupied in so doing. The infant is swaddled. 
Behind her is a female who appears to be in the 
act of rushing in with dishevelled hair and violent 
gesture, and in one hand brandishing a whip or a 
thunder-bolt. This is probably some emblematic 
person, the messenger of death, or a fury, whose 
personification would be a key to the whole. What 
they are all wailing at, I know not ; whether the 
lady is dying, or the father has directed the child 
to be exposed: but if the mother be not dead, 
such a tumult would kill a woman in the straw in 
these days. 

The other compartment, in the second scene 
of the drama, tells the story of the presentation of 
the child to its father. An old man has it in his 
arms, and with professional and mysterious offici- 
ousness is holding it out to the father. The father, 
a middle-aged and very respectable-looking man, 



THE AGE OF PERICLES. 149 

perhaps not long married, is looking with the ad- 
miration of a bachelor on his first child, and perhaps 
thinking, that he was once such a strange little 
creature himself. His hands are clasped, and he is 
gathering up between his arms the folds of his cloak, 
an emblem of his gathering up all his faculties to 
understand the tale the gossip is bringing. 

An old man is standing beside him, probably 
his father, with some curiosity, and much tender- 
ness in his looks. Around are collected a host of 
his relations, of whom the youngest, a handsome 
girl, seems the least concerned. It is altogether 
an admirable piece, quite in the spirit of the 
comedies of Terence.* 

MICHAEL ANGELO'S BACCHUS. 

The countenance of this figure is a most revolt- 
ing mistake of the spirit and meaning of Bacchus. 
It looks drunken, brutal, narrow-minded, and has 
an expression of desolateness the most revolting. 
The lower part of the figure is stiff, and the manner 
in which the shoulders are united to the breast, 
and the neck to the head, abundantly inharmonious. 

* This bas-relief is not antique. It is of the Cinquecento. 



150 THE AGE OF PERICLES. 

It is altogether without unity, as was the idea of 
the deity of Bacchus in the conception of a Catholic. 
On the other hand, considered only as a piece of 
workmanship, it has many merits. The arms are 
executed in a style of the most perfect and manly 
beauty. The body is conceived with great energy, 
and the manner in which the lines mingle into 
each other, of the highest boldness and truth. It 
wants unity as a work of art — as a representation 
of Bacchus it wants everything. 

A JUNO. 
A statue of great merit. The countenance ex- 
presses a stern and unquestioned severity of domi- 
nion, with a certain sadness. The lips are beautiful 
— susceptible of expressing scorn — but not without 
sweetness. With fine lips a person is never wholly 
bad, and they never belong to the expression of 
emotions wholly selfish — lips being the seat of ima- 
gination. The drapery is finely conceived, and the 
manner in which the act of throwing back one leg 
is expressed, in the diverging folds of the drapery 
of the left breast fading in bold yet graduated lines 
into a skirt, as it descends from the left shoulder, 
is admirably imagined* 



THE AGE OF PERICLES. 151 



AN APOLLO. 



with serpents twining round a wreath of laurel 
on which the quiver is suspended. It probably 
was, when complete, magnificently beautiful. The 
restorer of the head and arms, following the indi- 
cation of the muscles of the right side, has lifted 
the arm, as in triumph, at the success of an arrow, 
imagining to imitate the Lycian Apollo in that, 
so finely described by Apollonius Rhodius, when 
the dazzling radiance of his beautiful limbs shone 
over the dark Euxine. The action, energy, and 
godlike animation of these limbs speak a spirit 
which seems as if it could not be coftsumed. 



ARCH OF TITUS. 

On the inner compartment of the Arch of Titus, 
is sculptured in deep relief, the desolation of a city. 
On one side, the walls of the Temple, split by the 
fury of conflagrations, hang tottering in the act of 
ruin. The accompaniments of a town taken by 
assault, matrons and virgins and children and old 
men gathered into groups, and the rapine and 



152 ARCH OF TITUS. 

licence of a barbarous and enraged soldiery, are 
imaged in the distance. The foreground is occu- 
pied by a procession of the victors, bearing in their 
profane hands the holy candlesticks and the tables 
of shewbread, and the sacred instruments of the 
eternal worship of the Jews. On the opposite side, 
the reverse of this sad picture, Titus is represented 
standing in a chariot drawn by four horses, crowned 
with laurel, and surrounded by the tumultuous 
numbers of his triumphant army, and the magis- 
trates, and priests, and generals, and philosophers, 
dragged in chains beside his wheels. Behind him, 
stands a Victory eagle-winged. 

The arch is now mouldering into ruins, and the 
imagery almost erased by the lapse of fifty gene- 
rations. Beyond this obscure monument of Hebrew 
desolation, is seen the tomb of the Destroyer's 
family, now a mountain of ruins. 

The Flavian amphitheatre has become a habi- 
tation for owls and dragons. The power, of whose 
possession it was once the type, and of whose de- 
parture it is now the emblem, is become a dream 
and a memory. Rome is no more than Jerusalem. 



[ 153] 



REFLECTIONS. 

LIFE. 

Life, and the world, and whatever we call that 
which we are, and feel, is an astonishing thing. 
The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder 
of our being. We are struck with astonishment at 
some of its transient modifications, but it is itself 
the great miracle. What are the changes of em- 
pires, the wreck of dynasties, with the opinions 
that supported them — what is the birth and ex- 
tinction of religions, and of political systems, to 
life?* What are the revolutions of the globe which 
we inhabit, and the operations of the elements of 
which it is composed, compared with life ? what is 
the universe of stars and suns, and their motions, 
and the destiny of those that inhabit them, com- 
pared with life ? Life, the great miracle, we admire 
not because it is so miraculous. If any artist, I do 

* It is singular, that Napoleon at St. Helena, as stated in 
Las Cases' Memoirs, should have been led into a similar reflexion. 
" Qu'est-ce que la vie 1 Quand et comment la recevons-nous ? 
Tout cela est-il autre chose encore que le myst^re V 



154 REFLECTIONS. 

not say had executed, but had merely conceived 
in his mind, the system of the sun, the stars, and 
planets, they not existing, and had painted to us 
in words or upon canvas the spectacle now afforded 
by the sight of the cope of heaven, and illustrated 
it by astronomy, what would have been our admi- 
ration ! — or had imagined the scenery of the earth, 
the mountains, and the seas, and the rivers, and 
the grass and the flowers, and the varieties of the 
forms and the masses of the leaves of the woods, 
and the colours which attend the rising and the 
setting sun, and the hues of the atmosphere turbid 
or serene, truly we should have been wonder- 
struck, and should have said, what it would have 
been a vain boast to have said, Truly, this creator 
deserves the name of a God. But now, these things 
are looked upon with little wonder ; and who views 
them with delight, is considered an enthusiast or 
an extraordinary person. 

The multitude care little for them. It is thus 
with life, that includes all. What is life? Thoughts 
and feelings arise with or without our will, and we 
employ words to express them. 

We are born, and our birth is unremembered, 
and our infancy remembered but in fragments' 



REFLECTIONS. 155 

We live, and in living we lose the apprehension 
of life. 

DEATH. 

By the word death, we express that condition in 
which natures resembling ourselves apparently 
cease to be what they were. We no longer hear 
them speak, nor see them move. If they have 
sensations or apprehensions, we no longer partici- 
pate in them. We know no more, than that those 
internal organs, and all that fine texture of material 
frame, without which we have no experience that 
life or thought can subsist, are dissolved and 
scattered abroad. # 

The body is placed under the ground, and after 
a certain period there remains no vestige even of 
its form. This is that contemplation of inexhaust- 
ible melancholy, whose shadow eclipses the bright- 
ness of the world. The commonest observer is 
struck with dejection at the spectacle, and contends 
in vain against the persuasion of the grave, that 
the dead indeed cease to be. 

The corpse at his feet is prophetic of his own 
destiny. Those who have perceived him, whose 
voice was delightful to his ear, whose touch met, 



156 REFLECTIONS. 

and thrilled, and vibrated to his like sweet and 
subtle fire, whose aspect spread a visionary light 
upon his path, these he cannot meet again. The 
organs of sense are destroyed, and the intellectual 
operations dependent on them, have perished in 
their sources. How can a corpse see and feel? 
What intercourse can there be in two heaps of 
putrid clay and crumbling bones piled together ? 

Such are the anxious and fearful contemplations, 
that, in spite of religion, we are sometimes forced 
to confess to ourselves. 

LOVE. 

The mind selects among those who most re- 
semble it, that which is most its archetype and 
instinctively fills up the interstices of the imperfect 
image, in the same manner as the imagination 
moulds and completes the shape in the clouds, or 
in the fire, into a resemblance of whatever form, 
animal, building, &c. happens to be present to it. 

Man is in his wildest state a social animal — a 
certain degree of civilization and refinement ever 
produces the want of sympathies still more intimate 
and complete, and the gratification of the senses 
is no longer all that is desired. It soon becomes 



REFLECTIONS. 157 

a very small part of that profound and complicated 
sentiment which we call love, which is rather the 
universal thirst for a communion not merely of the 
senses, hut of our whole nature, intellectual, imagi- 
native, and sensitive, and which, when indivi- 
dualized, becomes an imperious necessity, only to 
be satisfied by the complete, or partial, or supposed 
fulfilment of its claims. This want grows more 
powerful in proportion to the developement which 
our nature receives from civilization ; for man never 
ceases to be a social being. 



REMARKS ON 'MANDEVILLE' AND 
MR. GODWIN. 

The author of ' Mandeville' is one of the most 
illustrious examples of intellectual power of the 
present age. He has exhibited that variety and 
universality of talent which distinguishes him who 
is destined to inherit lasting renown, from the 
possessors of temporary celebrity. If his claims 
were to be measured solely by the accuracy of his 
researches into ethical and political science, still it 



158 REMARKS ON < MANDEVILLE' 

would be difficult to name a contemporary compe- 
titor. Let us make a deduction of all those parts 
of his moral system which are liable to any possible 
controversy, and consider simply those which only 
to allege is to establish, and which belong to that 
most important class of truths which he that an- 
nounces to mankind seems less to teach than to 
recall. 

' Political Justice' is the first moral system expli- 
citly founded upon the doctrine of the negativeness 
of rights and the positiveness of duties, — an obscure 
feeling of which has been the basis of all the poli- 
tical liberty and private virtue in the world. But 
he is also the author of ' Caleb Williams' ; and if 
we had no record of a mind, but simply some frag- 
ment containing the conception of the character of 
Falkland, doubtless we should say, "This is an 
extraordinary mind, and undoubtedly was capable 
of the very sublimest enterprises of thought." 

St. Leon and Fleetwood are moulded with some- 
what inferior distinctness, in the same character of 
an union of delicacy and power. The Essay on 
Sepulchres has all the solemnity and depth of 
passion which belong to a mind that sympathises, 
as one man with his friend, in the interest of future 



AND MR. GODWIN. 159 

ages, in the concerns of the vanished generations 
of mankind. 

It may be said with truth, that Godwin has 
been treated unjustly by those of his countrymen, 
upon whose favour temporary distinction depends. 
If he had devoted his high accomplishments to 
flatter the selfishness of the rich, or enforced those 
doctrines on which the powerful depend for power, 
they would, no doubt, have rewarded him with 
their countenance, and he might have been more 
fortunate in that sunshine than Mr. Malthus or 
Dr. Paley. But the difference would have been as 
wide as that which must for ever divide notoriety 
from fame. Godwin has been to the present age 
in moral philosophy what Wordsworth is in poetry. 
The personal interest of the latter would probably 
have suffered from his pursuit of the true prin- 
ciples of taste in poetry, as much as all that is 
temporary in the fame of Godwin has suffered 
from his daring to announce the true foundations 
of minds, if servility, and dependence, and super- 
stition, had not been too easily reconcileable with 
his species of dissent from the opinions of the 
great and the prevailing. It is singular that the 
other nations of Europe should have anticipated, 



160 REMARKS ON ' MANDEVILLE' 

in this respect, the judgment of posterity; and 
that the name of Godwin and that of his late 
illustrious and admirable wife, should be pro- 
nounced, even by those who know but little of 
English literature, with reverence and admiration ; 
and that the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft should 
have been translated, and universally read, in France 
and Germany, long after the bigotry of faction has 
stifled them in our own country. 

1 Mandeville' is Godwin's last production. In 
interest it is perhaps inferior to ' Caleb Williams.' 
There is no character like Falkland, whom the 
author, with that sublime casuistry which is the 
parent of toleration and forbearance, persuades us 
personally to love, whilst his actions must for ever 
remain the theme of our astonishment and abhor- 
rence. Mandeville challenges our compassion, and 
no more. His errors arise from an immutable 
necessity of internal nature, and from much con- 
stitutional antipathy and suspicion, which soon 
spring up into hatred and contempt, and barren 
misanthropy, which, as it has no root in genius or 
virtue, produces no fruit uncongenial with the soil 
wherein it grew. Those of Falkland sprang from a 
high, though perverted conception of human nature, 



AND MR. GODWIN. 161 

from a powerful sympathy with his species, and 
from a temper which led him to believe that the 
very reputation of excellence should walk among 
mankind unquestioned and unassailed. So far as 
it was a defect to link the interest of the tale 
with anything inferior to Falkland, so is Man- 
deville defective. But the varieties of human cha- 
racter, the depth and complexity of human motive, 
— those sources of the union of strength and weak- 
ness — those powerful sources of pleading for uni- 
versal kindness and toleration, — are just subjects 
for illustration and developement in a work of 
fiction ; as such, ' Mandeville' yields in interest 
and importance to none of the productions of the 
author. The events of the tale flow like the stream 
of fate, regular and irresistible, growing at once 
darker and swifter in their progress : there is no 
surprise, no shock : we are prepared for the worst 
from the very opening of the scene, though we 
wonder whence the author drew the shadows which 
render the moral darkness, every instant more 
fearful, at last so appalling and so complete. The 
interest is awfully deep and rapid. To struggle 
with it, would be the gossamer attempting to bear 
up against the tempest. In this respect it is more 



162 REMARKS ON < MANDEVILLE' 

powerful than ' Caleb Williams': the interest of 
1 Caleb Williams' being as rapid, but not so pro- 
found, as that of ' Mandeville.' It is a wind that 
tears up the deepest waters of the ocean of mind. 

The language is more rich and various, and the 
expressions more eloquently sweet, without losing 
that energy and distinctness which characterize 
' Political Justice' and ( Caleb Williams.' The 
moral speculations have a strength, and consis- 
tency, and boldness, which has been less clearly 
aimed at in his other works of fiction. The plead- 
ings of Henrietta to Mandeville, after his recovery 
from madness, in favour of virtue and of bene- 
volent energy, compose, in every respect, the most 
perfect and beautiful piece of writing of modern 
times. It is the genuine doctrine of ' Political 
Justice,' presented in one perspicacious and im- 
pressive river, and clothed in such enchanting 
melody of language, as seems, not less than the 
writings of Plato, to realize those lines of Milton : 

How charming is divine philosophy — 

Not harsh and crabbed— 

But musical as is Apollo's lute .' 

Clifford's talk, too, about wealth, has a beautiful, 
and readily to be disentangled intermixture of truth 



AND MR. GODWIN. 163 

and error. Clifford is a person, who, without those 
characteristics which usually constitute the sublime, 
is sublime from the mere excess of loveliness and 
innocence. Henrietta's first appearance to Man- 
deville, at Mandeville House, is an occurrence 
resplendent with the sunrise of life : it recalls to 
the memory many a vision — or perhaps but one — 
which the delusive exhalations of unbaffled hope have 
invested with a rose-like lustre as of morning, yet 
unlike morning — a light which, once extinguished, 
never can return. Henrietta seems at first to be 
all that a susceptible heart imagines in the object 
of its earliest passion. We scarcely can see her, 
she is so beautiful. There is a mist of dazzling 
loveliness which encircles her, and shuts out from 
the sight all that is mortal in her transcendant 
charms. But the veil is gradually undrawn, and 
she "fades into the light of common day." Her 
actions, and even her sentiments, do not correspond 
to the elevation of her speculative opinions, and 
the fearless sincerity which should be the accom- 
paniment of truth and virtue. But she has a 
divided affection, and she is faithful there only 
where infidelity would have been self-sacrifice. 
Could the spotless Henrietta have subjected her 



164 REMARKS ON « MANDEVILLE' 

love to Clifford, to the vain and insulting accident 
of wealth and reputation, and the babbling of a 
miserable old woman, and yet have proceeded un- 
shrinking to her nuptial feast from the expostu- 
lations of Mandeville's impassioned and pathetic 
madness I It might be well in the author to show 
the foundations of human hope thus overthrown, 
for his picture might otherwise have been illumined 
with one gleam of light. It was his skill to enforce 
the moral, " that all things are vanity," and "that 
the house of mourning is better than the house 
of feasting" ; and we are indebted to those who 
make us feel the instability of our nature, that we 
may lay the knowledge (which is its foundation) 
deep, and make the affections (which are its cement) 
strong. But one regrets that Henrietta, — who 
soared far beyond her contemporaries in her opi- 
nions, who was so beautiful that she seemed a 
spirit among mankind, — should act and feel no 
otherwise than the least exalted of her sex; and 
still more, that the author, capable of conceiving 
something so admirable and lovely, should have 
been withheld, by the tenor of the fiction which 
he chose, from execrating it in its full extent. It 
almost seems in the original conception of the cha- 



AND MR. GODWIN. 165 

racter of Henrietta, that something was imagined 
too vast and too uncommon to be realized ; and 
the feeling weighs like disappointment on the mind. 
But these objections, considered with reference to 
the close of the story, are extrinsical. 

The reader's mind is hurried on as he approaches 
the end with breathless and accelerated impulse. 
The noun smorfia comes at last, and touches some 
nerve which jars the inmost soul, and grates, as it 
were, along the blood ; and we can scarcely believe 
that that grin which must accompany Mandeville 
to his grave, is not stamped upon our own visage. 



ON < FRANKENSTEIN.' 

The novel of ' Frankenstein ; or, the Modern 
Prometheus,' is undoubtedly, as a mere story, one 
of the most original and complete productions of 
the day. We debate with ourselves in wonder, as 
we read it, what could have been the series of 
thoughts — what could have been the peculiar ex- 
periences that awakened them — which conduced, 
in the author's mind, to the astonishing combi- 



166 ON < FRANKENSTEIN/ 

nations of motives and incidents, and the startling 
catastrophe, which compose this tale. There are, 
perhaps, some points of subordinate importance, 
which prove that it is the author's first attempt. 
But in this judgment, which requires a very nice 
discrimination, we may be mistaken ; for it is 
conducted throughout with a firm and steady hand. 
The interest gradually accumulates and advances 
towards the conclusion with the accelerated rapidity 
of a rock rolled down a mountain. We are led' 
breathless with suspense and sympathy, and the 
heaping up of incident on incident, and the work- 
ing of passion out of passion. We cry " hold, hold ! 
enough!" — but there is yet something to come; 
and, like the victim whose history it relates, we 
think we can bear no more, and yet more is to be 
borne. Pelion is heaped on Ossa, and Ossa on 
Olympus. We climb Alp after Alp, until the horizon 
is seen blank, vacant, and limitless ; and the head 
turns giddy, and the ground seems to fail under 
our feet. 

This novel rests its claim on being a source of 
powerful and profound emotion. The elementary 
feelings of the human mind are exposed to view ; 
and those who are accustomed to reason deeply 



ON « FRANKENSTEIN.' 167 

on their origin and tendency will, perhaps, be the 
only persons who can sympathize, to the full extent, 
in the interest of the actions which are their result. 
But, founded on nature as they are, there is perhaps 
no reader, who can endure anything beside a new 
love story, who will not feel a responsive string 
touched in his inmost soul. The sentiments are so 
affectionate and so innocent — the characters of the 
subordinate agents in this strange drama are clothed 
in the light of such a mild and gentle mind — the 
pictures of domestic manners are of the most simple 
and attaching character : the father's is irresistible 
and deep. Nor are the crimes and malevolence of 
the single Being, though indeed withering and 
tremendous, the offspring of any unaccountable 
propensity to evil, but flow irresistibly from certain 
causes fully adequate to their production. They 
are the children, as it were, of Necessity and Hu- 
man Nature. In this the direct moral of the book 
consists ; and it is perhaps the most important, and 
of the most universal application, of any moral that 
can be enforced by example. Treat a person ill, 
and he will become wicked. Requite affection 
with scorn ; — let one being be selected, for what- 
ever cause, as the refuse of his kind — divide him, 



168 ON « FRANKENSTEIN/ 

a social being, from socie v \ and you impose upon 
him the irresistible obligations — malevolence and 
selfishness. It is thus that, too often in society, 
those who are best qualified to be its benefactors 
and its ornaments, are branded by some accident 
with scorn, and changed, by neglect and solitude 
of heart, into a scourge and a curse. 

The Being in c Frankenstein' is, no doubt, a 
tremendous creature. It was impossible that he 
should not have received among men that treatment 
which led to the consequences of his being a social 
nature. He was an abortion and an anomaly ; and 
though his mind was such as its first impressions 
framed it, affectionate and full of moral sensibility, 
yet the circumstances of his existence are so mon- 
strous and uncommon, that, when the consequences 
of them became developed in action, his original 
goodness was gradually turned into inextinguishable 
misanthropy and revenge. The scene between the 
Being and the blind De Lacey in the cottage, is 
one of the most profound and extraordinary in- 
stances of pathos that we ever recollect. It is 
impossible to read this dialogue, — and indeed many 
others of a somewhat similar character,-— without 
feeling the heart suspend its pulsations with 



ON < FRANKENSTEIN/ 169 

wonder, and the "teai. tream down the cheeks." 
The encounter and argument between Franken- 
stein and the Being on the sea of ice, almost ap- 
proaches, in effect, to the expostulations of Caleb 
Williams with Falkland. It reminds us, indeed, 
somewhat of the style and character of that ad- 
mirable writer, to whom the author has dedicated 
his work, and whose productions he seems to have 
studied. 

There is only one instance, however, in which 
we detect the least approach to imitation ; and 
that is the conduct of the incident of Frankenstein's 
landing in Ireland. The general character of the 
tale, indeed, resembles nothing that ever preceded 
it. After the death of Elizabeth, the story, like a 
stream which grows at once more rapid and pro- 
found as it proceeds, assumes an irresistible 
solemnity, and the magnificent energy and swift- 
ness of a tempest. 

The churchyard scene, in which Frankenstein 
visits the tombs of his family, his quitting Geneva, 
and his journey through Tartary to the shores of 
the Frozen Ocean, resemble at once the terrible 
reanimation of a corpse and the supernatural career 
of a spirit. The scene in the cabin of Walton's 



170 ON « FRANKENSTEIN.' 

ship — the more than mortal enthusiasm and gran- 
deur of the Being's speech over the dead body of 
his victim — is an exhibition of intellectual and ima- 
ginative power, which we think the reader will 
acknowledge has seldom been surpassed. 



ON THE REVIVAL OF LITERATURE. 

In the fifteenth century of the Christian era, a 
new and extraordinary event roused Europe from 
her lethargic state, and paved the way to her pre- 
sent greatness. The writings of Dante in the 
thirteenth, and of Petrarch in the fourteenth, were 
the bright luminaries which had afforded glim- 
merings of literary knowledge to the almost be- 
nighted traveller toiling up the hill of Fame. But 
on the taking of Constantinople, a new and sudden 
light appeared : the dark clouds of ignorance rolled 
into distance, and Europe was inundated by learned 
monks, and still more by the quantity of learned 
manuscripts which they brought with them from 
the scene of devastation. The Turks settled them- 
selves in Constantinople, where they adopted no- 



REVIVAL OF LITERATURE. 171 

thing but the vicious habits of the Greeks : they 
neglected even the small remains of its ancient 
learning, which, filtered and degenerated as it was 
by the absurd mixture of Pagan and Christian 
philosophy, proved, on its retirement to Europe, 
the spark which spread gradually and successfully 
the light of knowledge over the world. 

Italy, France, and England, — for Germany still 
remained many centuries less civilized than the 
surrounding countries, — swarmed with monks and 
cloisters. Superstition, of whatever kind, whether 
earthly or divine, has hitherto been the weight 
which clogged man to earth, and prevented his 
genius from soaring aloft amid its native skies. The 
enterprises, and the effects of the human mind, are 
something more than stupendous : the works of 
nature are material and tangible : we have a half 
insight into their kind, and in many instances we 
predict their effects with certainty. But mind seems 
to govern the world without visible or substantial 
means. Its birth is unknown ; its action and in- 
fluence unperceived ; and its being seems eternal. 
To the mind both humane and philosophical, there 
cannot exist a greater subject of grief, than the re- 
flection of how much superstition has retarded the 



172 REVIVAL OF LITERATURE. 

progress of intellect, and consequently the happiness 
of man. 

The monks in their cloisters were engaged in 
trifling and ridiculous disputes : they contented 
themselves with teaching the dogmas of their re- 
ligion, and rushed impatiently forth to the colleges 
and halls, where they disputed with an acrimony 
and meanness little befitting the resemblance of 
their pretended holiness. But the situation of a 
monk is a situation the most unnatural that bigotry, 
proud in the invention of cruelty, could conceive ; 
and their vices may be pardoned as resulting from 
the wills and devices of a few proud and selfish 
bishops, who enslaved the world that they might 
live at ease. 

The disputes of the schools were mostly scho- 
lastical : it was the discussion of words, and had 
no relation to morality. Morality, — the great 
means and end of man, — was contained, as they 
affirmed, in the extent of a few hundred pages of 
a certain book, which others have since contended 
were but scraps of martyrs' last dying words, 
collected together and imposed on the world. In 
the refinements of the scholastic philosophy, the 
world seemed in danger of losing the little real 



REVIVAL OF LITERATURE. 173 

wisdom that still remained as her portion ; and the 
only valuable part of their disputes was such as 
tended to develope the system of the Peripatetic 
Philosophers. Plato, the wisest, the profoundest, 
and Epicurus, the most humane and gentle among 
the ancients, were entirely neglected by them. 
Plato interfered with their peculiar mode of thinking 
concerning heavenly matters ; and Epicurus, main- 
taining the rights of man to pleasure and happiness, 
would have afforded a seducing contrast to their 
dark and miserable code of morals. It has been 
asserted, that these holy men solaced their lighter 
moments in a contraband worship of Epicurus, and 
profaned the philosophy which maintained the rights 
of all by a selfish indulgence of the rights of a few. 
Thus it is : the laws of nature are invariable, and 
man sets them aside that he may have the pleasure 
of travelling through a labyrinth in search of them 
again. 

Pleasure, in an open and innocent garb, by some 
strange process of reasoning, is called vice ; yet man 
(so closely is he linked to the chains of necessity — 
so irresistibly is he impelled to fulfil the end of his 
being,) must seek her at whatever price : he becomes 
a hypocrite, and braves damnation with all its pains. 



174 REVIVAL OF LITERATURE. 

Grecian literature, — the finest the world has ever 
produced, — was at length restored: its form and 
mode we obtained from the manuscripts which the 
ravages of time, of the Goths, and of the still more 
savage Turks, had spared. The burning of the 
library at Alexandria was an evil of importance. 
This library is said to have contained volumes of 
the choicest Greek authors. 



A SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT BY JURIES. 

A FRAGMENT. 

Government, as it now subsists, is perhaps an 
engine at once the most expensive and inartificial 
that could have been devised as a remedy for the 
imperfections of society. Immense masses of the 
product of labour are committed to the discretion 
of certain individuals for the purpose of executing 
its intentions, or interpreting its meaning. These 
have not been consumed, but wasted, in the prin- 
cipal part of the past history of political society. 

Government may be distributed into two parts : 
— First, the fundamental — that is, the permanent 



GOVERNMENT BY JURIES. 175 

forms, which regulate the deliberation or the action 
of the whole ; from which it results that a state is 
democratical, or aristocratical, or despotic, or a 
combination of all these principles. 

And Secondly — the necessary or accidental — 
that is, those that determine, not the forms accord- 
ing to which the deliberation or the action of the 
mass of the community is to be regulated, but the 
opinions or moral principles which are to govern 
the particular instances of such action or delibera- 
tion. These may be called, with little violence to 
the popular acceptation of those terms, Constitution, 
and Law : understanding by the former, the collec- 
tion of those written institutions or traditions which 
determine the individuals who are to exercise, in 
a nation, the discretionary right of peace and war, 
of death or imprisonment, fines and penalties, and 
the imposition and collection of taxes, and their 
application, thus vested in a king, or an hereditary 
senate, or in a representative assembly, or in a 
combination of all ; and by the latter, the mode of 
determining those opinions, according to which the 
constituted authorities are to decide on any action ; 
for law is either a collection of opinions expressed 
by individuals without constitutional authority, or 



176 GOVERNMENT BY JURIES. 

the decision of a constitutional body of men, the 
opinion of some or all of whom it expresses — and 
no more. 

To the former, or constitutional topics, this 
treatise has no direct reference. Law may be con- 
sidered, simply — an opinion regulating political 
power. It may be divided into two parts— General 
Law, or that which relates to the external and in- 
tegral concerns of a nation, and decides on the 
competency of a particular person or collection of 
persons to discretion in matters of war and peace 
— the assembling of the representative body — the 
time, place, manner, form, of holding judicial 
courts, and other concerns enumerated before, and 
in reference to which this community is considered 
as a whole; — and Particular Law, or that which 
decides upon contested claims of property, which 
punishes or restrains violence and fraud, which 
enforces compacts, and preserves to every man that 
degree of liberty and security, the enjoyment of 
which is judged not to be inconsistent with the 
liberty and security of another. 

To the former, or what is here called general 
law, this treatise has no direct reference. How 
far law, in its general form or constitution, as it 



GOVERNMENT BY JURIES. 177 

at present exists in the greater part of the nations 
of Europe, may be affected by inferences from the 
ensuing reasonings, it is foreign to the present pur- 
pose to inquire — let us confine our attention to 
particular law, or law strictly so termed. 

The only defensible intention of law, like that 
of every other human institution, is very simple and 
clear — the good of the whole. If law is found 
to accomplish this object very imperfectly, that im- 
perfection makes no part of the design with which 
men submit to its institution. Any reasonings 
which tend to throw light on a subject hitherto so 
dark and intricate, cannot fail, if distinctly stated, 
to impress mankind very deeply, because it is a 
question in which the life and property and liberty 
and reputation of every man are vitally involved. 

For the sake of intelligible method, let us assume 
the ordinary distinctions of law, those of civil and 
criminal law, and of the objects of it, private and 
public wrongs. The author of these pages ought 
not to suppress his conviction, that the principles 
on which punishment is usually inflicted are essen- 
tially erroneous ; and that, in general, ten times 
more is apportioned to the victims of law, than is 
demanded by the welfare of society, under the shape 



1/8 GOVERNMENT BY JURIES. 

of reformation or example. He believes that, al- 
though universally disowned, the execrable passion 
of vengeance, exasperated by fear, exists as a chief 
source among the secret causes of this exercise of 
criminal justice. He believes also, that in ques- 
tions of property, there is a vague but most effective 
favouritism in courts of law and among lawyers, 
against the poor to the advantage of the rich — 
against the tenant in favour of the landlord — against 
the creditor in favour of the debtor ; thus enforcing 
and illustrating that celebrated maxim, against 
which moral science is a perpetual effort : To whom 
much is given, of him shall much he required ; and 
to whom men have committed much, of him they will 
ask the more. 

But the present purpose is, not the exposure of 
such mistakes as actually exist in public opinion, 
but an attempt to give to public opinion its legi- 
timate dominion, and an uniform and unimpeded 
influence to each particular case which is its object. 

When law is once understood to be no more 
than the recorded opinion of men, no more than 
the apprehensions of individuals on the reason- 
ing of a particular case, we may expect that the 
sanguinary or stupid mistakes which disgrace the 



GOVERNMENT BY JURIES. 179 

civil and criminal jurisprudence of civilized nations 
will speedily disappear. How long, under its pre- 
sent sanctions, do not the most exploded violations 
of humanity maintain their ground in courts of 
law, after public opinion has branded them with 
reprobation ; sometimes even until by constantly 
maintaining their post under the shelter of venerable 
names, they out- weary the very scorn and abhor- 
rence of mankind, or subsist unrepealed and silent, 
until some check, in the progress of human im- 
provement, awakens them, and that public opinion, 
from which they should have received their reversal, 
is infected by their influence. Public opinion would 
never long stagnate in error, were it not fenced 
about and frozen over by forms and superstitions. 
If men were accustomed to reason, and to hear the 
arguments of others, upon each particular case that 
concerned the life, or liberty, or property, or repu- 
tation of their peers, those mistakes, which at pre- 
sent render these possessions so insecure to all but 
those who enjoy enormous wealth, never could 
subsist. If the administration of law ceased to 
appeal ^om the common sense, or the enlightened 
minds of twelve contemporary good and true men, 
who should be the peers of the accused, or, in 



'fe. 



180 GOVERNMENT BY JURIES. 



cases of property, of the claimant, to the obscure 
records of dark and barbarous epochs, or the pre- 
cedents of what venal and enslaved judges might 
have decreed to please their tyrants, or the opinion 
of any man or set of men who lived when bigotry 
was virtue, and passive obedience that discretion 
which is the better part of valour, — all those 
mistakes now fastened in the public opinion, would 
be brought at each new case to the * * * . * 



THE END. 



LONDON-: J. HOLMES, TOOK'S COURT, CHANCERY LAKE. 



























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